Augustine and Confucian Virtues: Mencius and Augustine on the Proper Motivations for Moral Conduct

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

As two influential spokesmen of the Confucian and Catholic traditional values, Mencius and Augustine are most articulate interpreters in their own intellectual circles. Many articles have discussed the Mencius or Augustine’s ethics with focus on various dimensions in philosophical and theological domains. This article raises an interesting and valuable question to compare their insights on proper motivations for moral conducts. From the perspective of systematic theology and comparative religious studies, this subject deserves careful attention and an in-depth exploration. However, this mode of comparison underlies many risks and critical views which this article has to deal with. While the author realized these difficulties by herself/himself, she/he does not offer a satisfying answer as most readers expect. We appreciate this author’s courage to challenge the traditional borders of both Augustinian studies and Mencius’s doctrines, however, we have to face up to some obvious weakness of this article’s approaches and argumentations.

        First, this author adopts an unfair lens of “pagan virtues” to evaluate Mencius’s and Confucian ethics from the so-called Augustinian perspective and this academic approach is obviously out of date. As declares in the final sentence of her/his abstract that “although Mencius ultimately stands within the tradition of pagan virtue, he represents…”, this author uses a repetitive terminology of “pagan” to refer to Mencius’s doctrine in her/his article. Truly, Augustine takes the term “pagan” as a subheading to his magnum opus, De civitate Dei, his purpose is to refute those who persecutes Christians or refuses the grace of God in the late Roman empire (this would also apply to other nations which do not have the Christian faith during Augustine’s era). In other words, the term “pagan” in Augustine’s writings has a clear historical background and this outdated terminology is not suitable to apply in the modern academic discussions of Chinese religions (Confucianism, in particular). In the modern Confucian-Christian dialogue, a fair and objective academic evaluation is more accepted than any biased views on other faith tradition.

            Second, this approach of comparison does not have any textual support of historical communication between Mencius and St. Augustine, and this author does not adopt proper methodology to deal with this problem. For Augustine, he does not know Chinese traditional religions (such as Confucianism), although he has some scattered comments on ancient Indian religious practice in De civitate Dei.  It is meant that it is risky to make a direct comparison on these two figures who actually never meet in the history. It is evidently an error from the historical point of view. Yes, we agree with a possible proposition that the comparison might be conducted in the field of systematic theology and comparative religious studies, but such a comparison has a rigid standard which should be grounded on the method of systematic analysis of theology or some similar historical contexts. Unfortunately, this article does not adopt any modern method of systematic analysis to deal with these difficulties. Even worse, this author fails to realize that the historical backgrounds of the late Roman empire (which St. Augustine lived, 354-430 A.D.) and the period of Warring States (which Mencius lived, 372-289 B.C.) are actually no common in religious conditions, let alone time, space, political tendencies, religious orientations, doctrinal interests of these two irrelevant historical figures. This approach to comparison is thus arbitrarily and is based on illusive facts.

        Thirdly, this author ignores the very crucial study by Wang Tch’ang-Tche. Wang Tch’ang-Tche’s French work “Saint Augustin et les vertus des paiens” (1938) is the first research work and one of the most significant comparative study in the field of virtues. Although this author mentions Tch’ang-Tche’s work only once (this happens only in her/his list of bibliography), she/he actually discusses nothing of Wang throughout the whole text.

What is more important, this article does not offer new knowledge for promoting the present Augustinian-Confucian dialogue. In the second part “Augustine on pagan virtue and the proper motivations for moral conduct”, this author shows some Augustine’s views on ethics, such as humility, kenosis, piety, two loves (two cities), love of God (as the basis of true virtues), among others. Unfortunately, these are common sense for all Augustinian researchers. In a similar way, the third section “Mencius on virtue” and the fourth section “the crux of the comparison” mention some Mencius’s statements which are actually all familiar to most Chinese preliminary learners. In other words, what this article addresses (on Augustine and Mencius’s teachings) are very basic knowledge and, actually, common sense for many Augustinian and Confucian scholars, nothing creativity as an academic writing.

To summarise, while the question of the comparison of ethical views between Augustine and Mencius is of great significance in modern Sino-Western religious dialogue, this article fails to find a proper methodological approach to deal with a series of problems such as irrelevance of historical backgrounds, biased and outdated views (such as terminology of pagan), less of some necessary reference, arbitrary argumentation (lack of historical facts). And, if considering more about the fact that there is actually no creativity (just some common sense) in documents and opinions, we do not recommend this article to Religions, as the high-quality aim is always a good journal pursues.  

The quality of English language is ok, minor editing of language required. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The question of why one should be moral is one of the oldest and most difficult questions in moral theory: How can human beings live up to the moral standards to which they are subject? What is the relationship between moral judgments and convictions and man’s desires, inclinations, and feelings? What is the role of reason in motivating action? What is the significance of religious faith for human practice?

In the said article, we have an interesting and informative comparison between Augstine's and Mencius' understanding of proper motivations for moral conduct. Both ethics are heteronomous ones - Augustin in view of Christian God and Mencius in view of Cofnucian Heaven. This latter aspect could be deepened in the article by providing a deeper understanding of Heaven only within the book Mengzi. 

The alternative, autonomous idea of moral motivation that man can act autonomously and responsibly only on the grounds of his reason and should recognize the unconditionality of moral demands is to be found in the thought of Immanuel Kant (set forth in his Critique of Practical Reason, Riga 1788).

The title of this article should be its subtitle, i.e., "Mencius and Augustine on the Proper Motivation for Moral Conduct." This should suffice.

It would be good if the author could add Hanyu pinyin (transcription) for single/two Chinese character/s in the text.

If the author does not make his/her own translation from Mengzi and chooses one translation. A footnote with explanation - why this translation - would be for a reader also of value!

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Suggestions and comments:

The author(s) should note early on that “Mencius” is the Latinized version of the Chinese name Mengzi. I have no objection to the author’s use of the name Mencius, which is more well-known to Westerners, but some brief mention of this issue should be made.

The author(s) might note on the first page that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire during Augustine’s lifetime, and that rival “pagan” religions like Greek and Roman religion not only fell out of political favor during this time but were also in a state of cultural decline. This historical context is important, I think, for understanding Augustine’s views and the contrast he draws between Christian and pagan virtues. I also think that the term “paganism” needs some clarification. This was a Christian theological term used to characterize non-Christian and non-Jewish peoples in the ancient world, and it was used not only to talk about the religious beliefs and practices of non-Christian and non-Jewish peoples but also the work of “pagan” philosophers like Plato and Cicero, which deeply influenced the development of Augustine’s own philosophical and theological views. In this regard, it seems somewhat misleading to call Mengzi (Mencius) a “pagan” at all, as he was a member of a cultural and philosophical tradition that Augustine knew nothing about, and whose traditional values differed markedly in many respects from those of cultures like ancient Greece and Rome. The author(s) also sometimes give the impression that there is a global “pagan” or humanistic virtue ethical tradition and that Mencius is a member of it, too (see, e.g., 182-186), but I see no good reason to suppose this. Perhaps the author assumes, following Augustine, that any humanistic account of the virtues and the good life is “pagan,” and that pagan virtue is inferior in turn to Christian virtue (because Christianity is true and paganism is false, or at least not in possession of as much truth as Christianity). But such assumptions will not be granted by non-Christians, and need to be argued for.

I am skeptical of the author’s unsupported claim in section 3 (line 181) that Mencius is “probably best suited to represent the Confucian ethical stance vis-à-vis Augustine,” and for two reasons. First, how could one determine this without considering the work of other Confucian philosophers, for example Xunzi? And second, I am not sure there is such a thing as “the Confucian ethical stance,” which strikes me as a gross oversimplification of a complex tradition.

The main problem with the paper, in my view, is that the author(s) show a bias towards Augustine’s ethics that will strike many as unjustified. At 422-426, for example, Mencius’s ethics is described here as suffering from a vice, self-love, that Augustine (presumably correctly) diagnoses, and as having an “underdetermined” account of Heaven, one that does not meet “Augustinian demands” (presumably Christian theological ones). But does Mencius’s remark at 7A4 really show that he extols a form of self-love? This seems clear to the author(s), but not to me. And even if it did, is self-love in any form really bad for human beings? Why not think instead that Augustine’s austere views on the evils of self-love are pathological and psychologically unrealistic? Furthermore, why should Mencius be expected to meet Augustinian demands for what an adequate ethics or account of the virtues should look like, and doesn’t this simply assume without argument that the Augustinian account is correct? Many classical Confucian thinkers took the view that Heaven (Tian) is quite mysterious to human beings, and that it was not only epistemically unjustified for human beings to claim too much knowledge about transcendent or metaphysical matters, but also ethically undesirable for us to dwell too much on those matters as well, as doing so directs our attention away from its proper this-worldly focus. If the classical Confucians were right, then wouldn’t Augustine be wrong to devote so much effort to theological speculation, and wrong in particular to base his ethics so heavily on uncertain divine commands, beliefs about the reality of divine grace and of supernaturally infused virtues, etc.? Finally, the author concludes by remarking on the “perspicacity of Augustine’s analysis of pagan virtue” (514-516), but this judgement depends crucially on a number of poorly supported assumptions, including the accuracy of applying Augustine’s concept of self-love to “pagan” Confucian ethics; of using Augustine’s views on the sinful nature of self-love as a measuring stick to evaluate accounts of the virtues; and of privileging his views on such matters as human nature and “the redemptive power of God’s love and grace.” If the author’s real aim is to show the superiority of Augustinian ethics to its pagan competitors (in this case, Mencius’s ethics), then much more work needs to be done to support this conclusion.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1, Re-reading the author's revised texts (with major revisions), we notice that she/he has realized the significance of reevaluating the term "paganism" (referring to Confucian value system) and the text has been improved in this aspect.

2, While it is risky for comparing two ancient figures who did not have any commons in historical and religious backgrounds, it might be possible in some typological conditions with very careful argumentations. The author made further explanation for this deficiency in his revised paper.

3, I agree with the author's explanation for the present revised text.

Minor editing of English language required.

Reviewer 3 Report

I've reviewed the changes made by the authors of the paper and am satisfied with them. I'm now happy to approve the paper for publication.