Taking moral wisdom from Confucius
taking the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism
Confucianism supplies an example of an outsider's way of reading: Chesterton can recognize moral wisdom in a tradition without submitting to its authority. He does not actually say here that Confucianism has no religion or ritual. The distinction concerns his relation to the teaching, and prepares the next paragraph's contrast between useful hints and a teacher trusted to correct him.
The Analects makes this example intelligible, while also complicating it. In James Legge's translation, VI.20 makes wisdom consist in attending to human duties while showing respect for spiritual beings and keeping one's distance from them. XI.11 redirects a question about serving the dead toward learning to serve the living. These passages give a reader grounds for concentrating on practical ethics without first settling questions about spirits. Confucius also describes learning from other people's good qualities while avoiding their bad ones (VII.21), and recommends discriminating selection from what one hears (VII.27). Selective appropriation is therefore not merely a modern procedure imposed on this text. Analects, VI.20, XI.11, VII.21, 27.
But distance from spirits is not their denial, and the same work places moral cultivation within inherited observances. Confucius participates in sacrifices with an attitude of presence, insists that his own participation matters (III.12), and defends a ceremony against a disciple who wishes to discontinue its sacrificial sheep (III.17). The latter scene is particularly suggestive beside Chesterton's argument: a pupil's present estimate of a practice's value does not exhaust what the teacher sees in it. This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that Chesterton had these passages in mind. Confucianism can function as his example of wisdom borrowed from outside without being reduced to a store of detachable maxims. Analects, III.12, 17.
The inspected Confucian witness is Legge's revised second edition of The Chinese Classics, volume I (1893), transcribed on Wikisource; its numbering is used throughout. Orthodoxy first appeared in 1908; the Chesterton witness inspected here is Project Gutenberg no. 16769, whose imprint lists reprints through 1934.
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