We are pleased to have Joshua Brown on our blog to discuss his new book Aquinas and the Early Chinese Master. Joshua Brown is associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s University (Md.).
Q: What intellectually inspired you to see the connection between Thomas Aquinas and Chinese philosophy and made you want to write about it?
A: My research interests are primarily fueled by my life situation: my wife is Malaysian Chinese, and I grew up non-Catholic in rural southeastern NC. Thus when I became Catholic and married my wife, our home sort of accidentally became a “Chinese Catholic” home. I addressed that problem as a theology nerd would, and decided to explore that project through engaging Chinese philosophy and Chinese Catholic theology.
This specific book really was a product of falling in love with Chinese philosophy and wanting to take it seriously as a theological resource. Additionally, in my doctoral work, I had been formed by Thomistic thinkers (though I don’t consider myself a Thomist in a strict sense) and had grown to love and appreciate Aquinas’ surgical and careful approach to addressing theological questions. Eventually, I came to think it was a shame that Aquinas had never learned to read Chinese and had never read classical Chinese texts, and I wondered what would he have done with Chinese texts if he could have read them. Then one day the lightbulb came on, and I realized that was itself a bookthat I just had to write. Thus, Aquinas and the Early Chinese Masters is my attempt to recreate what it might have been like for Aquinas to encounter early Chinese philosophy.
Q: How did you decide which Chinese philosophers to connect with specific chapters of the Summa theologiae?
A: This was actually a difficult process in terms of deciding on the final interlocutors. Initially, I wanted to include texts from other traditions (such the Daodejing and the writings of Zhuangzi) or other time periods (such as Confucian philosophy in the Han dynasty) in the book, and I still think that is fruitful. However, in the process of writing the book, I realized that the sort of reading I was trying to provide was beneficial for its depth rather than breadth, and I began to focus on those questions/themes that I thought either would have most attracted Aquinas’ attention, or were of most interest in the context of Chinese Catholic tradition. These themes/questions mostly came from the Confucian tradition and the Mohist tradition, and so I focused on those. The structure piece was easier to solve. Pairing engagements with the Summa seemed to neatly follow from the overall theme of the book of engaging in the experiment of thinking through what Aquinas might have made of Chinese philosophy. The structure of the Summa is part of Aquinas’ gift for how to think about theological problems, and so it seemed natural to seek to find connections between the Chinese traditions and questions or themes he had framed in the various parts of the Summa.
Q: What was the most interesting or surprising part of your research?
A: The biggest surprise I discovered had to do with the sources I was engaging in Chinese philosophy. I had gone into the book with a very critical reading of the Mozi, which makes sense given I have been a very sympathetic reader of Confucian philosophy (which was deeply critical of Mohism). In my research, I was forced to attend to the Mozi very carefully and I walked away rather blown away with some of the deftness of Mohist thought. I also came to believe Aquinas would have really enjoyed reading the Mozi! I still prefer Confucianism in general, but I have also come to believe Chinese Catholic theology could deeply benefit from more prolonged engagements with Mohist philosophy.
The most interesting part of my research was also a big surprise to me. When I finished the first draft of the book, I had proposed it as a work of comparative theology, primarily for a Western audience. But with some sage advice from a mentor, I came to realize the book really was more about Chinese Catholic theology. In order to do justice to that angle, I really had to dive much deeper into the Chinese Catholic tradition than I had before (I had read much, but not in the focused way one does when researching for a book). I became increasingly impressed and moved by the richness of Chinese Catholic thought and reworked the book to try to connect more strongly with that tradition. In that way, my deeper discovery of Chinese Catholic theology really changed the entire soul of the book from being merely an interesting intellectual experiment to being a contribution (however modest) to a larger and noble project of Catholic theology.
Q: Ideally, what would you see as the next step in your research, or where would you like to see future scholars develop your work?
A: Since I finished Aquinas and the Early Chinese Masters, I’ve begun to focus a bit more on identifying, translating, and recovering Chinese Catholic theology. I’ve especially become enamored with the writings of Stanislaus Luo Guang (1911-2004), former Archbishop of Taipei. Luo was a highly skilled philosopher and theologian whose thought greatly embodied the synthesis of Confucian philosophy and Catholic theology that I’ve been trying to cultivate in my publications so far. Currently, I plan on publishing some translations of his writings, and hopefully a book-length study of his major books. Additionally, I would like to return to the direct engagement between Chinese philosophy and Catholic theology. Eventually, I would like to finish a followup work to this book, focusing on Augustine and the early Chinese masters.
In terms of future development, I’d say the relationship between Chinese philosophy and Catholic theology has been largely ignored for so long, and there are tremendous opportunities for scholarly discovery. I would welcome any engagement in this field! For example, I think there are fantastic possibilities for political theological engagements with Chinese principles of law and governance (such as the Legalist thought of Han Feizi), studying lines of metaphysical rapprochement between Neo-Confucianism and Catholic theology, and integrating or harmonizing Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue theory with classical and Han Confucian virtue theory. At the very least, I hope my books inspire people who are more intelligent and skilled than I am to engage with this kind of work and improve upon my attempts at it. And, of course, I hope future scholars come to better appreciate the beauty, truth, and goodness of the Chinese Catholic theological tradition that has wrestled with these questions, often in an exemplary fashion.