The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Ecumene (Part I)
The rise of Asia, especially China, has raised a unique challenge for western political scientists in trying to understand and predict whether civilizational conflict and war will transpire.[i] In understanding China as a type of spiritual and pragmatic ecumene, Voegelin can help political scientists in their endeavours. For Voegelin, China has traditionally understood itself as both a spiritual (representing the unity of all humankind) and a pragmatic (an imperial empire) ecumene in a cosmological form: the pragmatic is an analogue of the spiritual, just as human politics is an analogue of the cosmic existence.
This chapter recounts Voegelin’s account of the Chinese ecumene and sees whether the theory provides a useful way to understand civilizational conflict and war. By looking at the Imjin War (1592-98), we can see how Voegelin’s theory of ecumene works with competing cosmological accounts by the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. If successful, this in turn will aid political scientists in better understanding and predicting the international relations between West and East.
The Chinese Ecumene
According to Voegelin, China, like other civilization in the Middle East, understood itself as occupying the center of the cosmos and accordingly symbolize its order as a cosmic analogue; but, unlike these civilizations, China was not surrounded by societies of comparable civilizational rank.[ii] For example, Moses and the foundation of Israel broke the cosmological form of Egyptian existence through the revelation of a world-transcendent God.[iii] The revelation of God in the covenant relationship with the people of Israel was experienced as divine intervention beyond the cosmos itself. This event contradicted the cosmological order of Egypt as a universal ecumene.
The Chinese situation was different because during its founding period it was not surrounded by societies of comparable civilizational rank and did not have contact with India or the Middle East (CW 17, 353). The structure of the Chinese consciousness therefore was different from the Middle Eastern because it associated its ecumene with the identity of China itself. The history of China consequently is the history of humankind in both its pragmatic and spiritual sense: the known inhabited world united under imperial and spiritual rule of the Chinese emperor. As Voegelin remarks, Chinese history is similar to the history of Israel’s chosen people which representatively carries the burden of humankind under God, although Chinese ecumenism never broke from its cosmological form (CW 17, 354).
This fact bewilders western scholars who study China, with one side claiming that China neither has philosophy, logic, or science, and the other arguing the opposite (CW 17, 355-56). What these scholars fail to see is that the cosmological form of the Chinese ecumene, its civilization understood as an analogue to cosmic order, resists the analytical theories and tools of non-cosmological societies, such that reside in the West.[iv] Because of its geographical isolation and encompassing a single society, China cannot be understood in the same conceptual framework as one understands the West. The collapse of one society is not absorbed into another one in China (e.g. the Greeks by the Roman Empire); rather, one dynasty succeeds another in the same ecumene.
Thus, when spiritual breakthroughs do appear in China, they are manifested in the cosmological form of the ecumene, thereby lacking the precision and analytical clarity that one finds in the West (CW 17, 365). For instance, when the emperor rules with virtue and righteousness, heaven and earth are combined harmoniously. The theoretical advance of good political rule associated with the emperor’s character immediately backslides into the cosmological language of heaven and earth. This is not a criticism of the Chinese ecumene but instead an acknowledgement why western scholars have such difficulty understanding its civilization.
To make sense of its own cosmological order, Chinese thinkers articulated their experiences as historical cycles: the dynastic cycle, the five-hundred year cycle, and the cycle of ecumenic decay (CW 17, 366). The first cycle, the dynastic, is the family who acquires the necessary virtues, the appointment from Heaven, to rule until they have exhausted them and are overthrown. The five-hundred cycle belongs to those who are the “uncrowned kings” of China, the “sages” of the Confucian and Taoist movements who provide an independent authority to royal rule. The third, the cycle of ecumenic decay, is the collapse of the ecumene in both its pragmatic and spiritual form.
For Voegelin, the Chinese ecumene was unique from its Middle Eastern, and later Western, counterparts because of its identification of humankind with a single society and its manifestation in cosmological form. But what happens to the Chinese ecumene when it is confronted with societies of comparable civilizational status, such as Korea and Japan in the sixteenth century? These essays will examine the consequences of such a confrontation by examining the Imjin War (1592-98) and see what the effects to the Chinese ecumene were when challenged by Japan and Korea who had conceived of their own societies as ecumene.
[i] Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides’ Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
[ii] Eric Voegelin, Order and History Volume IV: The Ecumenic Age (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Volume 17), Michael Franz, ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 352-54. All subsequent citations will be in-text as CW17.
[iii] Eric Voegelin, Order and History Volume I: Israel and Revelation (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Volume 14), Maurice P. Hogan, ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 431-80.
[iv] An exception to this is Filippo Marsili, Heaven is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to “Religion” and Empire in Ancient China (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).