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This article traces Chosŏn’s Neo-Confucian encounter with Matteo Ricci’s catechism, known as Ch’ŏnju sirŭi (天主實義) in Korea. It explores how this inter-cultural ex-perience culminated in a transformation from philosophical investigation, towards praxis, and its embodiment in a self-evangelizing Catholic Church. It outlines the spiritual metamorphosis which took place as Korean scholars, motivated mainly by Yi Pyŏk, converted to Catholicism without any foreign missionaries, based mainly on Ricci’s ideas about God. This inspired them to convert, and then to proselytize their new beliefs. This article draws upon “deconstruction,” stemming from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). It deconstructs Korean Neo-Confucian rejections of Ricci’s concept of God (天主, Ch’ŏnju), which undermined their dependency on principle (理, i), and illus-trates how the incarnation of Jesus, as God-in-man, also threatened to overturn constructed Neo-Confucian hierarchies, which controlled their modus vivendi. Finally, it deconstructs the earliest Catholic texts written by Koreans, showing how Confucian ideas were supplemented with Christian ones, sowing seeds of social transformation, visible in their writings. These early Catholics would face the wrath of Neo-Confucian authority, which set about oppressing their beliefs, their writings and their burgeoning sense of equality.

In 1839, on the twelfth day of the fourth month, after suffering torture and an imprisonment of three years, Magdalene Kim Ŏbi, a commoner widow in her sixties, was beheaded for practicing Catholicism. As an elderly widow, she was supposed to receive special protection from her government. How then did the Chosŏn state justify killing her? In order to answer this question, this article will survey public proclamations against Catholicism issued in 1801, 1839, 1866, and 1881. In the course of this article, I will argue that these edicts created an image of Catholics and the religion they followed as such a serious threat that their executions were necessary for the good of the state, the civilization it defended, and the people it governed. In particular, I will contend that Catholics were primarily portrayed as rebels and animals, rhetorically transforming them from subjects deserving protection to dangerous beasts needing to be slaughtered. These portrayals not only justified the violent suppression of Catholicism, but also provided a useful foil against which the state could justify its own rule, presenting itself as the beleaguered defender of true civilization against bestial, rebellious followers of an evil religion and therefore the center around which the people of Chosŏn must rally around and to which they must give their ultimate loyalty. In turn, these extreme images helped drive the suppressions, making them more expansive and intense than they might otherwise have been, leading to a level of state violence directed against the common people not seen previously in Korean history.

Many works have been written on the early Korean Catholic Church, but little has been said concerning the legal angle of the repression conducted by the Chosŏn state. Each anti-Christian campaign had a legal basis and was officially implemented in the frame of the legal system supported by the Great Ming Code, which was the penal code in use during the Chosŏn dynasty. The present study thus suggests that legal history may provide a suitable framework for the analysis of the anti-Christian campaigns of the nineteenth century and complement existing literature. I begin with investigating which laws were referred to during Catholic-related judicial cases and, then, I propose a few elements in order to explain why the government put such an emphasis on immediate decapitation, which was the gravest legal punishment. I also analyze how government officials enforced and misused the penal code to reach their objectives, and I conclude that laws, in the end, constituted an ideal means to justify the repression of Catholicism.

This study analyzes the acceptance of Catholicism, centered on the Holy Mother and the Son of God, in late Chosŏn Korea from the perspective that it caused a rift in society’s patriarchal family system, based on Neo-Confucianism. First, Catholicism resurrected the divine concept of “Mother,” which had diminished under patriarchy. In Chosŏn Korea a father’s position passed on to his son, and mothers were beings who rarely attained anything as mothers (or women). However, the Holy Mother disrupted society’s Neo-Confucian framework, and people accepted her as a sacred woman and mother possessing the power to save them from all difficulties. The Holy Mother made it possible for Jesus to be born and save people from their sins. Adherents believed that the work to save humankind is achieved through the inseparable relationship between the Holy Mother and the Son of God. Differing from “father-son” patriarchy, the Holy Mother and Jesus were a new “mother-son” concept. Under society’s patriarchal system, a mother giving birth to a child was a biological phenomenon, and people saw mothers as playing a passive role in the process. They believed it was the father who actually “gave birth” to children. Therefore, a mother having a positive standing in the birth of one like Jesus was a viewpoint separate from society’s patrilineal view. Catholic teachings came as a shock to those in Chosŏn society who could not recognize a new “Son of Heaven.” The concept of a brutally punished individual being the “Savior” was far removed from the image of a sage expounding the topic of flawless human behavior. Although Catholicism may not have accelerated the breakdown of patriarchy, it did create some ruptures, which eventually led to social changes.

The Catholic movement in Korea was birthed among Confucian scholars who sought to supplement Confucian philosophy with Catholic teaching. Hence, the earliest didactic writings of Korean Catholics were more syncretistic in content, integrating Catholic and Confucian themes. But as the movement became increasingly circumscribed by Church teachings and regulations, the focus in its didactic literature shifted to exclusively Catholic and other-worldly themes. Two main points of divergence from Korean tradition may be traced in these early texts: loyalty extended to a transcendent object and belief in the soul’s immortality. These transcendent motifs become more pronounced in the later texts. This divergence, in turn, signifies a shift to a subjectivity of the spiritual and intellectual self as separate from the world.

In sixteenth century Chosŏn Korea, T’oegye and Kobong initiated a debate over the relationship between the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings, their moral characteristics, and, also, their relationship to other psychological factors. This debate soon called for a successive debate between Yulgok and Ugye who asked more or less the same questions by focusing on the moral mind and the human mind rather than the Four and the Seven. Although Yulgok was debating with Ugye, his real opponent was T’oegye who was then deceased. Yulgok closely studied and rejected most of T’oegye’s theses on (a) the mutual exclusiveness between the Four and the Seven, (b) the identification of the Four with the moral mind and, also, of the Seven with the human mind, and (c) the mutual or reciprocal arousal of li and ki. In this article, I shall contend that Yulgok’s theory of mind is inconsistent in that he mistakenly identified the moral characteristics of the Four with those of the moral mind. I shall begin by examining Yulgok’s reasons for the rejection of the above mentioned theses. In doing this, we shall see the relationship between such psychological concepts as mind, nature, and feelings with respect to ontological concepts such as li and ki. In the end, we shall conclude that Yulgok has to give up the idea that the moral mind shares the same moral characteristics as the Four and the original nature.

The present study focuses primarily on Soon Hyun’s involvement in the Hawaiian Branch of the Korean National Revolutionary Party that was organized in Hawaii in 1943. The party was originally organized in China in 1935, and its American branch in Los Angeles was created in 1942. As its chairman Hyun raised money and sent it to Kim Wŏn-bong to assist Kim in his struggle against the Japanese forces in China. Also, as a chairman of the Hawaiian branch of the party, Hyun expressed displeasure with a number of decisions made by the government of the United States by writing to news media in Honolulu. He wrote to protest against the American military decision to classify the Korean residents in Hawaii during the Pacific War as enemy aliens. He was not in favor of the American military government established in the southern half of the Korean peninsula after the end of World War II and condemned the indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in North Korea during the Korean War. Because of the stance he took on these issues and the company he kept, he was mistaken for a radical or a Communist sympathizer. But he was only a passionate patriot for Korea who believed that the Korean masses should have control over political power and that the government to be established in Korea after the end of World War II should be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

This essay aims to provide a critical view of South Korean intellectuals and unification policy makers who stress the undisputed role of nationalism, across the diverse ideo-logical spectrums, in constructing ‘inter-Korea’ reconciliation in South Korean society. They contend that meanings of counter-hegemonic practice against anti-North Korean ideology are already determined within the politics of national identification. However, this mode of thinking remains a predicament of the South Korean public’s critical engagement with the way in which a moral claim to national identification is conflated with inter-Korea economic collaboration along the lines of neo-liberalism. But I also want to illuminate the connection that neo-liberalism and new conservatism in South Korea make in the attempt to help anti-North Koreanism survive democratic challenges. My critical evaluation of the connection suggests a discursive condition of what I call ‘inter-Korea sociability’, in which the South Korean public can appropriate social and historical claims about the inter-Korea relationship that range from the atrocious and violent events in the war to the so-called North Korean human rights crisis. I argue that two Koreas’ reconciliation can come through resisting the romanticization of Koreans’ own normative commitment to idealized national authenticity and liberal human rights.