Justified True Belief

(●) The teacher who answered a collapsing world with a better man rather than a new god, and whose sayings then shaped the moral habits of a quarter of the human race. + He was born into a China coming apart. The Zhou kings, the royal house that the Chinese states had acknowledged as their overlord for centuries, still sat on a throne in the west, but they had stopped ruling. The real power lay with a few dozen quarrelling states, and inside those states with a few great families who kept private armies and assassinated one another’s relatives. Confucius spent his life looking for a ruler who would let him try a different way of holding a country together, and he never found one. He died thinking he had failed. Two things then happened that he could not have predicted. The first is that his students wrote down what he had said, and the book they made, the Analects, became one of the most quoted books in the largest civilization on earth. Every candidate for imperial office learned it by heart through the six centuries the examinations were built on it. It was read in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and it is still the first thing most people outside China can name about Chinese thought. The second is that when Jesuit missionaries reached the Ming court in the sixteenth century they found that the ground had been prepared in a way none of them expected, by a man who had insisted for two millennia that Heaven cares how you treat your neighbour. He is on a Christian apologetics site for that reason, and for a second one. Confucius is the cleanest test case in history for how far conscience gets on its own. He had no Scripture, no prophet, no revelation, and no interest in speculating about the gods, and he still arrived at a version of the golden rule, a duty to the poor, a horror of hypocrisy, and a conviction that Heaven itself was watching. What he never arrived at was forgiveness. That gap is the most instructive thing about him. One signature fact: his family register is still being kept. The fifth revision, published at Qufu in 2009, runs to eighty volumes and records eighty-three generations and about two million people, which makes it the longest continuously maintained family tree in the world.

(●) 551 BC: Born in a small state in eastern China to a family with an old name and no money. + His name was Kong Qiu, and the Chinese have always called him Kongzi, Master Kong. "Confucius" is the Latin the Jesuits made of Kong Fuzi, "Master Kong" with an extra title of respect, and Europe has used it ever since. He was born, by the traditional reckoning, in 551 BC at Zou, a settlement in the small eastern state of Lu, in what is now Shandong province. The date is not quite firm. The Gongyang and Guliang commentaries, two ancient running expositions of the Spring and Autumn Annals (the terse year-by-year chronicle of Lu itself), put the birth in the twenty-first year of Duke Xiang of Lu, a year earlier, and the difference has never been settled. What makes 551 the standard figure is that it is the one the Han court historian Sima Qian gives in the earliest full biography we have, and the one the world counts anniversaries from. His death in 479 BC is better attested than his birth: the Zuo Commentary records it in the sixteenth year of Duke Ai. The family was descended from the nobility of the vanished state of Song and had come down in the world. His father, remembered as a soldier of Lu, is said to have died when the boy was very small, leaving a household with a respectable name, a claim on the old rituals, and almost nothing else. Confucius grew up on the wrong side of the line that mattered most in his society, close enough to the aristocracy to know exactly what he was missing. The sources for all of this are late. The Analects preserves sayings, not a life; the connected story comes from Sima Qian, writing about 100 BC, some four centuries after the funeral, and from anecdotes told by schools that had an interest in the shape of the story. So a good deal of what is told about his childhood is tradition rather than documentation, and those are not the same kind of thing. Tradition is what people remembered, repeated and tidied; documentation is what somebody wrote down at the time. The fatherless boy with the noble surname belongs to the first category.

(●) c. 532 BC: He kept stores and counted livestock, and taught himself what the nobility learned from tutors. + The earliest notices of his working life are wonderfully unglamorous. The Mencius, a book by his most famous later follower, remembers him as a keeper of stores and an overseer of fields: a young man with a clipboard, checking that the grain tallied and the animals were fed. Tradition puts his marriage at about nineteen, and he had a son, Kong Li, known as Boyu. He was not ashamed of any of it. Years later, when a high official marvelled at how many things the Master could do, Confucius gave the reason without decoration: "When I was young, my condition was low, and therefore I acquired my ability in many things, but they were mean matters" (Analects 9:6, in the Victorian translation of the Scottish missionary James Legge). Mean here means lowly, the sort of work a gentleman was supposed to be above. What he did with his twenties is the part that changed history. The education of a Zhou aristocrat was a fixed curriculum: the old poems, the records of the former kings, the rules of ceremony, archery, chariot driving, music. Confucius acquired the lot without the birth that normally came with it, and he acquired it because he wanted it. His own account of his life is a single sentence about learning: "At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven" (Analects 2:4).

(●) c. 522 BC: He opened a school to anyone who could bring a gift, and the gift was the whole fee. + Somewhere around his thirtieth year he began to teach, and in doing it he broke a link that nobody in China before him is known to have broken: he detached education from birth. The classics, the rituals and the music had belonged to the households that could afford tutors. Confucius offered them to whoever turned up. The fee was symbolic and he said so. "From the man bringing his bundle of dried flesh for my teaching upwards, I have never refused instruction to any one" (Analects 7:7). A bundle of dried meat was the cheapest respectable present a poor man could carry; think of arriving at a lesson with a loaf of bread. Elsewhere he put the principle in a four-character phrase that Chinese schools have quoted ever since: "In teaching there should be no distinction of classes" (Analects 15:38). Later tradition credits him with three thousand students and seventy-two intimate disciples. The round numbers are traditional, but the effect was not. The men who came out of that school carried a new idea about who was allowed to be excellent, and the argument they were having with the aristocracy of their day is one a reader of the Gospels will find familiar: whether standing before God, or Heaven, is settled by pedigree or by what a person actually is.

(●) c. 501 BC: Lu finally gave him real office, and within three years he had overreached and lost it. + In his early fifties he got what he had wanted for thirty years: a post with power in it. The Zuo Commentary, the oldest narrative source for the period, names him Director of Corrections, which was the state’s chief judicial officer, the man answerable for law and punishment in Lu. Two of its entries touch that office, under the years 509 and 500 BC, and the earlier of the two is the weaker witness, since it mentions the post only in passing and is looking back on it from a distance. The date everyone uses for the appointment, about 501 BC, comes instead from Sima Qian, and his account does not stop there. It promotes Confucius further, through a town governorship and up to something like chief minister. Most historians think those promotions grew in the telling. One episode is remembered everywhere. In 500 BC the dukes of Lu and Qi met at a place called Jiagu to settle terms, and Confucius managed the ceremony. Tradition says the Qi side planned to seize the Duke of Lu under cover of a musical entertainment, that Confucius saw it coming, stopped the performance on a point of ritual, and came home with an apology and some disputed land returned. Whether or not the drama happened as told, the shape of it is exactly his politics: ceremony used as a real instrument of state, not decoration. Then he pushed too far. The government of Lu was not really the duke’s; it belonged to three great families, the Ji, the Meng and the Shu, each holding a walled town of its own with troops inside, which in practice meant three private fortresses inside one small state. In 498 BC the duke set out to pull those walls down, and the Zuo Commentary puts the work in the hands of Confucius’ disciple Zilu, who was then steward to the Ji family; Sima Qian credits the policy itself to Confucius. Two families agreed. The third refused, the coalition collapsed, and the reformer who had made himself inconvenient to the most powerful men in the country was finished in Lu. He left Lu in about 497 BC, aged about fifty-five, and did not come back for fourteen years.

(●) 497 BC: For fourteen years he offered himself to rulers who would not have him. + What he did next is one of the stranger careers in the ancient world: a middle-aged scholar with a following of students, driving from court to court through Wei, Song, Chen, Cai and Chu, asking for a chance to govern, and being turned down by everyone. It was not safe work. At a place called Kuang he was held by a hostile crowd, and Sima Qian explains it as a case of mistaken identity, the locals taking him for a man they had reason to hate; his answer was to appeal past his captors to Heaven, which is his instinct whenever he is cornered. In Song a powerful man named Huan Tui tried to have him killed, and he said, "Heaven produced the virtue that is in me. Huan Tui, what can he do to me?" (Analects 7:22, Legge’s spelling Hwan T’ui). In Chen the party ran out of food and his students were too weak to stand up. Zilu, the blunt one, asked whether a gentleman really had to put up with this, and got a hard answer: a gentleman may indeed have to endure want, but a small man in want loses all restraint (Analects 15:1). He was also mocked, and the Analects keeps the mockery in, which is one reason to trust it. Hermits and gate-keepers tell him the world is past saving and he should stop trying. A man describes him from a distance as one who knows it cannot be done and goes on doing it anyway. Read the travel years as a picture of stubborn hope and they make sense; read them as a career and they are a fourteen-year failure, and he knew it.

(●) 484 BC: He came home at about sixty-eight, and then buried his son and his two best students. + Lu took him back in about 484 BC, not as a minister but as an elder statesman it was polite to consult. He spent the last five years teaching and working on the old texts, and those years took almost everyone he loved. His son Boyu died before him. So did Yan Hui, the poorest and most gifted of his students, the one he had said learned faster than anyone and never repeated a fault, and the loss broke his composure completely: the Analects has him crying out that Heaven was destroying him, and when the disciples told him he was mourning beyond what ritual allowed, he answered that if there was ever a man to be mourned like this, it was this man. Zilu, the soldierly one who had followed him into every danger, was killed in the fighting in Wei in about 480 BC. There is no serenity in these last years. There is a very old man who has lost his son, his best student and his bravest friend, who says of himself only that he strives and teaches without weariness and would not dare call himself a sage (Analects 7:33), and who says, when a disciple asks why nobody understands him, "But there is Heaven; that knows me!"

(●) 479 BC: He died believing he had failed, and his students began gathering what he had said into the book that became the Analects. + He died in Lu in 479 BC, at about seventy-two, and was buried outside the city; the graveyard is still there at Qufu, and so are his descendants. He wrote no book of his own doctrine. Nothing survives that we can be sure he composed, and he seems not to have wanted it otherwise: "A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients" is how he described himself (Analects 7:1). What survives is a record of him talking, assembled by his students and their students out of remembered exchanges, which is why the Analects reads less like a treatise than like a notebook: a question, a short answer, sometimes a joke, occasionally a rebuke. The rise took time. The emperors of the Han dynasty made his teaching the framework of the state three and a half centuries later, and it stayed the framework, with interruptions, until the imperial examinations were abolished in 1905. The book itself keeps coming out of the ground. Three copies of the Analects on bamboo strips have been dug out of Han tombs since 1973, from Dingzhou in Hebei, from a tomb near Pyongyang, and from the Haihun burial in Jiangxi, all sealed within a few decades of each other in the first century BC, and they show a book already circulating widely and already varying in its details. The man who could not get one small state to listen ended up with the largest readership in the world.

What He Taught

(T1) Do not do to anyone what you would hate to have done to you, and the whole of goodness follows from that. + A student once asked him for one word to live by. Not a system, not a course of study, one word he could carry around. It is the sort of request a teacher usually refuses, and Confucius answered it. The word he gave was shu, which James Legge translated "reciprocity" and which means something like putting yourself in the other person’s place. Then he unpacked it in a single line: what you would not want done to yourself, do not do to others. That is the negative form of what Christians call the golden rule, and it turns up in Confucius about five centuries before the Sermon on the Mount. Behind it sits the idea his whole teaching runs on, ren, which gets translated benevolence, humaneness, or perfect virtue. The Chinese character is written with the sign for a person beside the sign for two, and that is a fair picture of the meaning: ren is what a person is like when there is somebody else in the room. It is not a warm feeling. He describes it as a discipline, something you practise until it costs you nothing: "To subdue one’s self and return to propriety, is perfect virtue" (Analects 12:1). And he could state it positively when he wanted to, in a line worth setting beside the negative one: the truly humane man, wanting to stand, helps others to stand, and wanting to grow, helps others to grow (Analects 6:28). The resemblance to the gospel is real, and so is the distance. Jesus puts the rule the other way round, as something to do rather than something to refrain from: "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 7:12). The negative version keeps you from harming your neighbour. The positive version gets you out of your chair, and it is the one that ends with a Samaritan kneeling in a ditch.

(Q) "Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others." + Source: Confucius, Analects XV.23 (Legge translation; some modern editions number this passage 15:24). The disciple Zigong has just asked whether there is one word that could serve as a rule of practice for a whole life. Legge prints "reciprocity" in small capitals because he is rendering a single Chinese word, shu (T1).

(T2) A people governed by punishments learns to dodge, and a people formed by ritual learns to be ashamed. + Everyone knows the difference between the two kinds of honesty. There is the driver who slows down because of the camera, and there is the driver who would be embarrassed to be the sort of person who speeds past a school. Both obey the limit. Only one of them is any good, and only one of them keeps obeying when the camera is broken. That distinction is the centre of Confucius’ politics, and he was arguing it against a real opposition. The states around him were going the other way: Zheng had its penal code cast in bronze in 536 BC and Jin followed in 513, so that every subject could read the schedule of punishments for himself, and the Zuo Commentary has Confucius saying of the second of those that Jin had lost its measure and would perish. Government by published statute and severe penalty had a reasonable ground, that people respond to incentives. His answer was that they respond by getting better at evasion. Lead a people with laws and punishments and they will keep out of trouble without ever developing a sense of shame; lead them with virtue and with li, and they will have the shame, and beyond that they will actually become good. Li is the word to slow down for. It is usually translated ritual or propriety, and it covers everything from the state sacrifices down to how you greet your mother-in-law, how you hand someone a cup, and what you wear to a funeral. To a modern ear that sounds like etiquette, which sounds trivial. His claim is that it is not trivial at all, because the small forms are how large feelings get learned. A child who is made to stand when an old man enters the room is being taught something about the old man that no lecture will teach; a man who performs the mourning rites properly for his father is being shaped into someone who can grieve. Ritual, for Confucius, is practice for being human, and he insisted that without the inward feeling the forms are worthless: high station held without generosity, ceremonies performed without reverence and mourning conducted without sorrow were things he said he had no wish to look at (Analects 3:26). Christians will recognize the argument, and also its limit. Scripture is entirely capable of saying that outward observance without a changed heart is offensive to God, and it says so at length in the prophets. What Scripture adds, and Confucius cannot, is a diagnosis of why the training so often fails: "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts" (Mark 7:21).

(Q) "If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good." + Source: Confucius, Analects II.3 (Legge translation). Legge’s "the rules of propriety" is li, the whole system of ceremony and manners (T2). The passage is the classic statement of the Confucian case against government by penalty alone.

(T3) A person is made at home, and a man who cannot be a son will not be much of a ruler. + Ask Confucius where a good society comes from and he does not point at a constitution. He points at a dining table. Xiao, filial piety, is the duty a child owes a parent, and in his hands it is the training ground for every other loyalty. One of his disciples, Youzi, put the doctrine in a sentence the tradition never stopped quoting: filial and fraternal conduct is the root, and the practical courses of life grow up out of it (Analects 1:2). Confucius himself made the political point directly. Asked why he did not take office, he quoted an old book back at the questioner: be filial, discharge your duties to your brothers, and those qualities are already displayed in government (Analects 2:21). The man who is trustworthy to the people who cannot dismiss him is the man you can trust with a province. He was also merciless about the cheap version. Filial piety in his day, he complained, had come to mean keeping your parents fed, and dogs and horses get fed too; without reverence, what exactly is the difference (Analects 2:7)? And he did not confuse it with obedience. A son should remonstrate with his parents, he says, and if they will not listen he should redouble his respect and hold on to his purpose, which is a description of loyal disagreement rather than submission. Scripture is on the same ground and puts it in the Ten Commandments: "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you" (Exodus 20:12). Jesus defends that commandment against people who were using religious pledges to dodge it (Matthew 15:4-6). But he also does something Confucius never does. He puts a claim above the family: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" (Matthew 10:37). In the Confucian ordering, family loyalty is the bottom of the stack and nothing goes underneath it. In the gospel there is a floor beneath the floor.

(Q) "In serving his parents, a son may remonstrate with them, but gently; when he sees that they do not incline to follow his advice, he shows an increased degree of reverence, but does not abandon his purpose; and should they punish him, he does not allow himself to murmur." + Source: Confucius, Analects IV.18 (Legge translation). Filial piety as he actually taught it, which is not the same thing as doing as you are told (T3). The son keeps his own judgment and his own courtesy at the same time.

(T4) A gentleman is made by his conduct and not by his birth. + Every society keeps a word for the sort of person everyone else is supposed to look up to. In his, the word was junzi, and it started out meaning "the ruler’s son": a man with the right ancestors. Confucius took the word away from the aristocracy and gave it to anyone who would earn it. In the Analects a junzi is someone who thinks about what is right where a small man thinks about what is in it for him, who is at ease without arrogance, who blames himself before he blames anyone else, and who is the same person in private that he is in public. Legge translated it "the superior man"; recent translators prefer "gentleman" or "exemplary person". None of the English is quite right, and all of them mean the same thing: nobility of character in place of nobility of blood. This is not a mild adjustment. In a society where your ancestors decided your worth, redefining the word for a nobleman around conduct is a demolition. He follows it through in his practice, admitting students who brought a bundle of dried meat instead of a pedigree, and he follows it through in his anthropology: by nature men are nearly alike, and it is practice that drives them apart (Analects 17:2). There is real light here. That worth is measured by character rather than ancestry is a truth the gospel drives much further: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). But the two roads to that equality run in opposite directions. For Confucius, everyone starts roughly level and the good separate themselves by effort, which quietly leaves a ladder in place with the cultivated at the top. Paul levels the ground the other way, by saying that everyone is at the bottom: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

(Q) "The mind of the superior man is conversant with righteousness; the mind of the mean man is conversant with gain." + Source: Confucius, Analects IV.16 (Legge translation). Legge’s "superior man" is junzi and his "mean man" is xiaoren, the small or petty person (T4). The test is not what a man has but what his mind runs to when it is left alone.

(T5) Heaven is real, it has given him something to do, and it never says a word. + Confucius is often described as a secular thinker, a sensible man who changed the subject whenever religion came up. He is not. Tian, Heaven, runs through his sayings as the thing he answers to. The word does not mean the sky, and it does not name a god with a biography and a temper; it means the moral order standing over everything, kings included, and in his mouth it has a will. Heaven produced the virtue that is in him. Heaven has a decree that he came to understand at fifty. The gentleman stands in awe of the ordinances of Heaven, and the small man neither knows them nor fears them (Analects 16:8). When a mob holds him at Kuang, his comfort is that Heaven has not finished with the cause he carries (Analects 9:5). When nobody understands him, Heaven does. But it never speaks to him, and he will not speculate about it. The Analects records the subjects he declined to discuss: strange occurrences, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings (Analects 7:20). Asked point blank about serving the spirits of the dead, he turned the question round: while you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits? Asked about death, he said, while you do not know life, how can you know about death (Analects 11:11)? He kept the sacrifices scrupulously, on the ground that reverence is good for the living, and he refused to say what was at the other end of them. Two things follow, and both matter for a reader coming from Scripture. The first is that here is a first-rate mind, with no Bible and no prophet, who arrives at a moral order above the state that even kings answer to, and at awe as the beginning of wisdom, which is where Proverbs begins too: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). The second is what the silence costs. His Heaven has a will and no voice, so it can be feared and obeyed but never known, and it can be offended with no way back. He says as much himself, in the bleakest line in the Analects.

(Q) "I do not murmur against Heaven. I do not grumble against men. My studies lie low, and my penetration rises high. But there is Heaven; that knows me!" + Source: Confucius, Analects XIV.37 (Legge translation). He has just said that nobody knows him, and Zigong has asked what he means. "My studies lie low" means that what he works on is ordinary and near at hand, while what he understands by it reaches high. It is the nearest thing in the Analects to a prayer, spoken by an old man who had stopped expecting to be understood (T5).

(Q) "He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray." + Source: Confucius, Analects III.13 (Legge translation). An official has quoted him a piece of court cynicism, that it pays better to flatter the kitchen than the household shrine, meaning that a man who wants to get on should cultivate whoever actually controls the food. Confucius rejects the whole calculation: there is no back door with Heaven, and no one to appeal to over its head. He states the problem of guilt exactly, and has no answer for it (T5).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Jesuits in Ming China turned him into a Latin author, and Europe met China through his book. + In 1583 an Italian Jesuit named Matteo Ricci was allowed to settle at Zhaoqing in the south of China, and he made a decision that shaped the next two centuries. Instead of preaching against Chinese learning, he learned it. He mastered the classics well enough to argue in them, dressed as a scholar, and presented Christianity to the educated class as the completion of what Confucius had taught rather than its replacement. His True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven of 1603 is built out of Confucian texts, setting them beside Christian doctrine and pointing at the seams. It worked on exactly the people he aimed at. Xu Guangqi, a first-rank scholar and later a grand secretary of the empire, was baptized as Paul in 1603, and he and men like him held both things at once: Confucian moral seriousness and Christian faith. What such converts said, in substance, was that Confucius had told them how a man should live, and Christ had told them who could make them live that way. Then the traffic reversed. In 1687 four Jesuits published Confucius Sinarum Philosophus at Paris, the first substantial Latin translation of the Confucian classics, carrying the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the Analects, and Europe read it. Leibniz, who never saw China and knew it only from the letters and printed accounts the missionaries sent home, edited a collection of those reports in 1697 and argued in the preface that Europe had something to learn from the Chinese about civil morals. Late in life he went further and wrote a treatise on the natural theology of the Chinese, defending the view that their ancient texts pointed toward the true God. The channel that carried the gospel into China carried Confucius back out.

(†) Rome spent two centuries deciding whether bowing to a tablet was worship, and finally decided it was not. + Ricci’s method rested on a judgement about one practice. Chinese families honoured their dead, and schools honoured Confucius, with bows, incense and offerings before a name tablet. Was that idolatry, which no convert could touch, or was it the civil respect a culture pays to a parent and a teacher, which a Christian could join? The question is not a quibble. If those rites were worship, the Jesuit mission was licensing idolatry among its converts; if they were not, then rival missionaries were demanding that Chinese Christians insult their own parents for no reason. Ricci and his successors judged them civil. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries, working among ordinary people rather than scholars and seeing what ordinary people evidently believed they were doing, judged them religious. Both sides had a case, and both had converts to lose. Rome eventually decided against the Jesuits. Clement XI forbade the rites in the bull Ex illa die in 1715, and Benedict XIV closed the argument in Ex quo singulari in 1742, imposing an oath against the rites on every missionary in China. The Kangxi emperor took the earlier ruling as an insult from a foreign power, and the mission that had been welcomed at court was set back for generations. Then, on 8 December 1939, Propaganda Fide issued the instruction Plane compertum est under Pius XII, permitting Catholics to take part in ceremonies honouring Confucius and at ancestral rites, and abolishing the oath of 1742. The judgement Ricci had made in the 1590s was, in the end, upheld. What was settled, though, is narrower than it can look at this distance. The church never ruled that Confucius taught the truth about God. It ruled that a bow to a tablet is a bow to a man.

(†) Protestant translators and Chinese converts read him as the conscience Paul says every nation is given. + James Legge was a Scottish missionary in Hong Kong who concluded that he could not preach to China without first understanding what China already believed, and then spent thirty years on the job. His Chinese Classics, five volumes in eight physical parts published between 1861 and 1872, gave English readers the Confucian canon with the Chinese text, a translation, and dense notes on the commentators, and it remained the standard English version for a century. Legge is the translator behind the quotations in the teaching rows (T1 to T5), and he did the work as a missionary: he wanted to draw on what was good in the Chinese classics, supply what was missing in them, and show his readers what truth there was in them about God. The theological category the missionaries reached for was general revelation, the knowledge of God available to anyone through creation, conscience and reason, as distinct from the special revelation that comes through Scripture. Paul states it as a fact about the whole human race: "For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness" (Romans 2:14-15). And when he preached in Athens he said God had set the nations in their times and places "that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him" (Acts 17:27). Feeling one’s way toward God is a fair description of what Confucius did. He had no prophet and no book from Heaven, and he still arrived at a Heaven that rules, a worth that ancestry cannot buy, a duty to the neighbour that does not depend on liking him, and shame as the mark of a conscience in working order. Set against the alternative on offer in his own century, government by fear and punishment, the achievement is enormous. It is what the conscience of the nations looks like when a great man takes it as far as it goes.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a Heaven that never speaks, a cure worked by self-improvement, and a silence about death. + The ledger has another column, and everything in it comes from what Confucius himself taught rather than from what later generations did in his name. - No forgiveness. "He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray" (Analects 3:13). Confucius sees the problem clearly and has nothing to offer against it. When Zilu asked leave to pray for him in a serious illness, he deflected the request: his praying, he said, had been going on for a long time (Analects 7:34). Scripture answers the same problem with a promise: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9), and "let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon" (Isaiah 55:7). - The cure is self-cultivation. Subdue yourself, return to propriety, study, practise, and become good. It is a noble programme and it assumes the one thing Scripture denies, that the will is up to the job. Paul, who had tried it harder than most, reports the result: "For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out" (Romans 7:18). The gospel starts on the other side of that admission: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). - Loyalty above justice. Told of a village where an upright man had reported his own father for stealing a sheep, Confucius said that in his part of the country the father conceals the misconduct of the son and the son conceals the misconduct of the father, and that uprightness is found in that (Analects 13:18). It is a humane instinct and it is the seed of a real problem, the family loyalty that protects a wrongdoer. The law of Moses puts impartiality at the centre of judgement instead: "You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor" (Leviticus 19:15). - Silence where the gospel is loudest. While you do not know life, how can you know about death (Analects 11:11). The reticence is honest, and it leaves the grave exactly as dark as it found it. The apostles announce the opposite: "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20). - Women. One saying puts "girls and servants" together as the hardest people to deal with, familiarity making them presumptuous and distance making them resentful (Analects 17:25; the two Chinese terms are nüzi, women, and xiaoren, small or petty persons, and translators render the pairing variously). It is a single line and later Confucian tradition made far more of the subordination of women than this, but the line is his. The gospel puts women in a different place from the start: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). None of this makes him an opponent. He is the best case there is for how much of the moral law a man can read off his own conscience and the wreckage of his own society, which is a great deal, and he is also the clearest evidence of where that reading stops. He knew there was a Heaven that could be offended. He did not know it had a name, or a voice, or a mercy. The prayer he could not pray, a Judean tax collector prayed five centuries later, in seven words: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13).