From 10 to 22 September, Professor Nicholas Adams of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham delivered a six-lecture series to faculty and students of our institute under the title European Philosophical Fantasies of China: Bayle to Hegel. The series traced European philosophers’ reflections on “China” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, revealing an intellectual thread that is rarely highlighted in mainstream histories of philosophy or the philosophy of religion.
Across the six lectures Professor Adams maintained a sustained mode of inquiry: what questions did these philosophers ask? Why did they pose those questions? Which key conceptual categories did they use? In doing so he not only reconstructed an overlooked history of ideas, but also demonstrated a distinctive methodological orientation of emergent religious philosophy.
It is important to emphasize that “China” as evoked by European thinkers was not the object of their genuine concern. For them China functioned as a distant, unfamiliar, and ancient civilizational image that served as a mirror: by observing the “other” they could reassess their own Christian traditions and reflect on possible relations between faith and reason, and between cultures.
More distinctly, the philosophers under discussion are not usually grouped together in standard narratives of philosophical history. Adams’s analysis, however, reveals an underlying thread linking them: each was attracted by the picture of Chinese civilization presented by missionaries and merchants, and each used that picture as the basis for far-reaching thought experiments.
·Context: European thought and the “China” of imagination
To understand this intellectual thread we must return to seventeenth– to nineteenth-century Europe. After the shocks of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, European intellectual life faced a set of acute tensions: the legitimacy of faith and its relation to violence, the limits of universal reason, and the interpretive challenges posed by cultural difference. Against this backdrop China gradually became an “ideal stage” for thought experiments.
Contemporary Europeans could not ordinarily access Chinese society directly; they depended on written reports and oral accounts brought back by Jesuit missionaries, merchants, and diplomats. Those accounts were often contaminated by misunderstanding and bias, yet precisely through this mediating distance European philosophers gained a foreign, apparently “neutral” vantage point. The image of “China” allowed them both to keep a distance from European religious disputes and to use the existence of the “other” to compel self-reflection.
It is in this environment that Bayle, Leibniz, Voltaire, Herder, and Hegel appear in succession, their reflections composing an alternative strand of intellectual history.
·First lecture：Bayle — a thought experiment using China as mirror
The series opens with the seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Bayle. Bayle’s intellectual horizon was post-Thirty Years’ War Europe, a continent scarred by religious violence. A central concern for many thinkers of the time was how to end coercion and violence carried out in the name of faith.
Within this context Bayle posed a striking thought experiment using “China” as his example: if missionaries in China — a civilization remote from the Christian world — still attempted to coerce the populace into conversion by force, how would Chinese rulers respond?
Professor Adams stressed that this is not merely a logical exercise but a training of moral imagination. Bayle asks readers to step outside Eurocentric assumptions and consider a key question: if someone considering Christianity observed so much internal violence within the Christian world, how would that person react?
From this thought experiment Bayle develops a threefold inquiry:
Practical: How would the Chinese court deal with such missionaries?
Rational: What kind of rational logic would underpin that handling?
Reflexive: What would this imply for Europe itself?
Bayle’s answer is that the Chinese emperor would expel those missionaries; any polity that values reason could not tolerate a group that uses violence as a mode of faith. By hypothesizing this response Bayle forces his audience to reassess Europe’s religious realities from an external viewpoint. On that “rational” premise he further stakes out his position: the phrase “compel them to come in” in Luke 14:23 — which many literalist interpreters read as a warrant for using force against nonbelievers — should not be construed as permission to coerce conversion by violence.
In this lecture Bayle’s core categories are violence and legitimacy, reason and prudence, imagination and the perspective of the other. His innovation lies in opening a space for Europeans to reflect on their own culture through reasoning that proceeds from an imagined foreign polity.
·Second lecture：Leibniz — the question of compatibility between Confucianism and Christianity
Where Bayle’s concern stems from the relation of faith to violence, Leibniz shifts the focus to the compatibility of cultural and religious traditions. Reports from missionaries and merchants presented China not only as an ancient civilization but as possessing an integrated ethical and political tradition — Confucianism. A pressing question thus emerged: can Confucian tradition be reconciled with Christian tradition?
This was not an abstract philosophical puzzle but a real historical problem. Jesuit missionaries in China encountered a practical difficulty: were Confucian rites (such as ancestor worship and rites honoring Confucius) religious in a way that conflicts with Christian monotheism, or were they merely social and ethical customs that could coexist with Christianity?
Two sharply divergent answers appeared in the debate:
One answer came from figures among the missionaries such as Niccolò Longobardo and his followers. They insisted that Confucian rites were incompatible with Christianity because the rituals involved forms of “veneration” or “worship” that infringed on core Christian boundaries; permitting such practices among Chinese converts would amount to an affront to God’s uniqueness. Longobardo’s stance represented a strict, exclusionary missionary approach.
The other answer was Leibniz’s. Although he never visited China, through extensive correspondence, texts, and scholarly exchange he developed a distinctive interpretation. For Leibniz Confucianism was not a religion running parallel to Christianity but an ethical and political rational tradition. Confucian thought explains cosmic order through li (principle) and regulates social relations through li (ritual). As such, Confucianism and Christianity need not be opposed; they could be complementary: Christianity supplies a theological basis of salvation, while Confucianism exhibits a remarkable moral rationality in social practice.
From this perspective Leibniz proposed a creative vision: Christianity and Confucianism could flourish together rather than exclude one another. He even suggested that European Christianity might be enriched by Confucian rational ethics, while Chinese culture could be elevated by exposure to Christianity’s transcendent truths.
Adams emphasized that Leibniz’s stance is not simply an imagination of China but a reflection on Europe’s internal debates about religious plurality and rational ethics. In contrast to Longobardo’s exclusion, Leibniz’s proposal models an alternative path: seeking compatibility amid difference and exploring cultural mutual enhancement.
·Third lecture：Voltaire — the imagination of the “other”
Compared with Leibniz, Voltaire takes a further methodological step. He refuses to rest with an abstract possibility of different interpretations and insists instead that we seriously consider what a given practice or belief means for its practitioners.
Many European scholars and missionaries of the time hastily labeled the Chinese “atheists” or “idolaters.” In the European context of the era, such labels were not neutral descriptions but loaded moral judgments implying lawlessness and the absence of moral order.
Voltaire offered a different interpretation. He argued that Confucian rites and the teachings of Confucius do not express nihilism or negation, but constitute a form of “civic religion” whose authority rests on human relations and moral order rather than on a theistic transcendence. Similar misreadings occurred in the interpretation of ancestor rites: missionaries often dismissed Chinese ancestral worship as the “worship of idols,” treating tablets or portraits as objects of adoration. Voltaire insisted this is a case of judging foreign customs by our own standards: for the Chinese, ancestor rites sustain familial and ethical bonds; they signify respect for lineage and responsibility rather than idol worship.
Here Voltaire almost develops a kind of “three-valued logic”: beyond true and false there is “true for someone.” This approach alerts thinkers to the contingency of prevalent prejudices and encourages imaginative engagement with distant life-worlds, thereby enabling openness to intercultural understanding.
Voltaire’s contribution lies in forcing European readers to recognize that meaning is not unitary but perspective-dependent. His sensitivity to interpretive difference laid methodological foundations for later work in cross-cultural understanding. As Adams observed, Voltaire’s engagement with Chinese civilization compelled European philosophy to confront a profound problem: universality and difference are not simply opposed but must be reconciled through concrete dialogue and comparison.
·Fourth lecture：Herder — sources, development, and cultural formation
In the fourth lecture Adams transported us fifty years forward, from the France of Louis XV to Prussia under Frederick the Great, and reexamined European perceptions of China. In the chapter on “China” in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History, Johann Gottfried Herder offers a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of a civilization known only through textual accounts.
Herder begins with an impressive empirical picture: China may not be as territorially vast as Europe, but it is densely populated, urbanized, well-connected, and advanced in both agriculture and handicraft; its social organization is orderly. The country values not only material production but information and transport; it exhibits a form of national self-consciousness: the Chinese not only rule the state but are skilled in the art of governance.
Such praise is not uncommon in missionary descriptions. Adams pointed out, however, that Herder’s originality lies in mining these materials to pose neglected questions. For example, missionaries recorded the long continuity of Chinese writing, rites, and ways of life; Herder inversely asks: what causes cultural and technological stagnation in China? To answer he introduces a key category — a genealogy of education and heredity, or more broadly the shaping role of geography and history. He connects Chinese character, culture, and technological development to two factors: a “natural form” attributed to Mongol ancestry and “historical effects,” particularly the content and methods of the educational system. Education’s emphasis on conformity and repetition of the past, Herder argues, suppresses innovation and progress. Through analyzing education and institutions, Herder shows how social practices shape cultural development and offers a defensible causal hypothesis.
Modern readers can reject the anachronistic, Eurocentric elements of Herder’s blood-line thinking; nevertheless we should not discard the heuristic value of his method: his caution, rationality, and moral imagination in writing about a wholly unfamiliar civilization are instructive. For instance, he can sympathetically understand China’s protective measures toward European traders and analyze European commerce’s costs and benefits from China’s standpoint.
Overall Herder offers a perspective distinct from Leibniz and Voltaire. Rather than privileging philosophical pluralism or multi-valued logic, he investigates the roots of cultural formation through facts, history, and educational analysis. His text is experimental in voice and form, employing multiple narratorial tones, irony, and unexpected turns to probe the ethics of representation. This lecture revealed a mode of philosophical practice that explores causal explanations for cultural difference and the ethics of writing about other societies.
·Fifth lecture：Hegel — an integrated ethical and historical view
The fifth lecture focused on Hegel’s distinctive framework for understanding Chinese civilization as articulated in his 1820s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.
Hegel’s method centers on understanding the world through opposing categories: subject and object, abstract and concrete, individual and community, freedom and authority, morality and custom, sameness and difference, stability and change, internal and external, infinite and finite, thinking and being. He diagnoses one-sidedness in these oppositions within European thought and attempts to synthesize them into a higher unity.
Applied to China, Adams shows, Hegel judged that many of these oppositions scarcely appeared in Chinese society. The relative absence of a clash between objective will and subjective freedom in early Chinese social structures meant, for Hegel, a deficit of the dynamic that drives European-style transformation; this underlies Hegel’s characterization of China as a “static kingdom.” Hegel further contends that Chinese culture was rooted in a finite set of “basic sources” (such as the Shujing, Yijing, and Shijing) and lacked the disruptive influence of diverse external traditions, so cultural development tended to be continuous and unidirectional.
Although Hegel emphasizes China’s statism and the lack of oppositional relations, Adams warned that Hegel’s account is not merely dismissive. China’s education system, the imperial examination, and bureaucratic structures exhibit highly organized institutional practices; language, craft, and local governance reveal civilizational complexity. Hegel’s interest is not only evaluative but methodological: by analyzing oppositional categories he seeks to explain how social structures, moral norms, and political institutions form.
Adams thus displayed the two faces of Hegel’s thought: on the one hand, a typically Eurocentric tendency to subsume China under European dichotomies; on the other, a systematic, insightful method for understanding “the other,” albeit constrained by the European sources on which Hegel relied. For contemporary readers this duality is a caution against Hegel’s continental bias and an invitation to learn from his systematic approach to culture and history — especially his use of oppositional concepts to reveal the logic of social structures.
In sum, the fifth lecture explained how Hegel examines China from religious, historical, and ethical perspectives, how he deploys a repertoire of oppositional categories to analyze societies, and how this analysis both limits and illuminates cross-cultural understanding.
·Sixth lecture：Toward a religious philosophy grounded in cross-cultural understanding
In the sixth lecture, European Fantasies: Culture and Change, Adams concluded the series by synthesizing his analyses. He argued that by studying Bayle, Leibniz, Voltaire, Herder, and Hegel we do more than recover their views of China; we gain insight into their modes of thought and patterns of reasoning. The lectures repeatedly underscored two central methods: first, to probe the problems and logics internal to a text so as to see how a thinker’s propositions address the questions posed; second, to identify and analyze the conceptual categories guiding their reflections — including judgment, meaning, and imagination — and to develop, where helpful, a three-valued logic to capture the multilayered relations in cultural interpretation.
Through these methods Adams presented a philosophical practice that differs from typical university courses in philosophy of religion: its concern is not limited to the existence of God, questions of good and evil, or the phenomenology of faith, but extends to comparing modes of thought and styles of reasoning. European philosophers’ reflections on China reveal not only European fantasies but also the development of distinctive investigative logics and semantics of meaning, stressing the importance of grasping the other’s thought. As Adams put it, this approach benefits comparative philosophy and religious thought and may inspire a broader, more self-reflective path for the philosophy of religion — one that attends to traditional core questions while foregrounding cross-cultural understanding, comparison, and self-critique.
The final lecture thus marked the close of the European Philosophical Fantasies of China series while opening avenues for further inquiry: How should we understand thought and belief in cross-cultural contexts? How can comparative logic and reflective inquiry expand the horizons of philosophy of religion? By posing these open questions, Professor Adams invited the audience into deeper reflection and left ample space for future scholarly exploration.
