The Eastern Roots of Secularism

The Origins Of Secularism

It would not be an exaggeration — though it would indeed be a bold assertion — to characterize the trajectory of European intellectual history as, in part, a prolonged reckoning with Augustine of Hippo (354–430), one of the formative figures of Christian Western thought. Writing at a time when the Roman Empire was on the verge of collapse, Augustine posited revelation as the sole and ultimate truth, and argued that reason, unaided by revelation, could neither fully comprehend God nor develop a proper conception of morality. Through this vision, Augustine subordinated reason to revelation, and earthly governance to the authority of the Church, which he regarded as the temporal embodiment of divine will. While Augustine did not seek to abolish reason entirely, his primary concern lay in explaining the mysteries of incarnation and the Trinity. By embracing the doctrine of original sin and embedding it at the very heart of Christian theology, he asserted that human reason had been irreparably damaged by the Fall and was therefore incapable of attaining truth independently. This approach reinforced the supremacy of revelation, diminishing reason to a mere servant of faith, and fostered the notion that societies not illuminated by Christian revelation — including Muslims, Indians, and Chinese — were incapable of arriving at true knowledge of God and morality by reason alone. Throughout the medieval period, concepts such as paganism, idolatry, and barbarism were deployed to characterize the non-Christian world. Augustine, who laid the foundations of medieval scholasticism and shaped the trajectory of Western philosophical heritage, thus exerted an indirect yet profound influence on the course of modern secularization. In Augustine’s thought, the relationship between reason and revelation was clearly delineated. The fundamental elements of the system he constructed may be summarized as follows:

1. 1. The Supremacy of Revelation: Reason alone cannot attain truth; only when guided by revelation can it find the correct path without error.
   2. The Subordination of Political Authority to the Church: The Church, as the earthly representative of revelation, must direct political governance according to divine imperatives.
   3. The Exclusion of Non-Christian Civilizations: Societies lacking revelation (Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, etc.) were deemed incapable of forming a true understanding of God and morality and were thus labeled as barbaric, uncivilized, or even savage.

This mode of thought rendered the Western worldview insular and self-referential. From the sixth century onward, Europe transformed, as it were, into a “castle” encircled by towering walls. The defining characteristic of this mentality was its perception of the non-European world as pagan, idolatrous, and primitive. Indeed, this perception extended so far that, up until the sixteenth century, even Muslims were often categorized as pagans.

Even Thomas Aquinas classified Muslims as pagans and associated Islam with idolatry. This historical reality reveals that the process leading toward secularization in the West cannot be explained solely by scientific advancement or the development of rational thought. Rather, it emerged as the consequence of internal intellectual tensions within Europe and its particular gaze toward the outside world.

The revelation-centered epistemology developed by Augustine, though shaped by specific theological concerns, had a dual effect: on one hand, it drew Europe inward and precipitated the onset of the medieval period; on the other, it became one of the greatest intellectual constraints on the history of Christianity in the West. The Church, by deriving its authority from revelation, gradually consolidated power. The first serious challenge to this intellectual paradigm arose among the Latin Averroists, influenced by Andalusian thought. They posited that reason and revelation constituted two independent sources of knowledge, an idea that caused a profound rupture within medieval thought. Yet it was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) who sought to resolve this tension. Aquinas admitted that reason, even without revelation, could attain certain truths about God and morality, though it would remain insufficient in grasping ultimate truths such as the essence of God. Thus, by establishing a balance between reason and revelation — interpreting them as complementary rather than antagonistic — Aquinas carved out a broader space for reason compared to Augustine. Unwittingly, Aquinas set into motion a fundamental shift whose reverberations would be felt not only across Europe but eventually in civilizations such as China as well.

This transformation provided the intellectual groundwork for Renaissance thinkers to accept that even non-Christian societies might, through the use of reason, make significant progress in understanding God and morality. At the same time, however, Martin Luther and his followers vehemently opposed this Thomistic openness. They accused thinkers like Aquinas of “paganizing” Christianity by placing undue trust in reason and called for a return to an Augustinian world, grounded firmly in the authority of revelation — though now proposing that reason should be entirely excluded from the realm of the Church. These debates, though intellectual in nature, soon acquired an unmistakable political dimension, intensifying the struggle between ecclesiastical and secular authorities. From the sixteenth century onward, this escalating conflict culminated in a period of bloodshed, poverty, death, plague, and widespread suffering — plunging Europe into an era of chaos and profound crisis. In response, the Catholic Church, seeking to reassert its authority and contain the turmoil, adopted a new strategy: an appeal to the infinite expanses beyond Europe. The Papacy, together with the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain, supported missionary activities alongside colonial expansion, aiming to spread Catholicism across the world, secure the obedience of foreign peoples to Rome, and profit from their resources. The reports produced by missionaries — who were the first to establish contact with diverse cultures and civilizations — simultaneously broadened Europe’s intellectual horizons and destabilized Augustine’s revelation-centered worldview, thereby laying the foundations for secular thought.

China’s Opening Doors To The Missionaries

With mathematical and physical treatises intended to impress the Chinese in one hand and the Bible in the other, Jesuit missionaries boarded Portuguese colonial ships and set sail for China, making stops along the way in India, Malaysia, and Japan before finally reaching their destination. Although the peoples they encountered during their journey largely confirmed the European stereotype of barbarous and idolatrous pagans, what they found upon entering China left them astonished. The missionaries had to wait nearly forty years before gaining real access to the interior of China, during which time they were compelled to learn Chinese and present themselves as Buddhist monks.

However, after departing from an embattled Europe — a continent plagued by war, famine, pestilence, and poverty — they found themselves in the midst of vast, fertile lands, a merit-based bureaucracy, social peace, order, and stability, all of which deeply impressed and captivated them. The missionaries’ observations regarding China can be summarized as follows:

1. 1. China possessed extraordinary wealth.
   2. Unlike Europe, China was not ravaged by plagues and civil wars; instead, it exhibited a remarkable degree of social order.
   3. Although the Chinese were not Christians, they nevertheless lived by a highly moral code.

In their reports back to Europe, the missionaries offered a striking admonition: “If you intend to send anyone here, send only the most educated and virtuous priests. The Chinese are disciplined and morally upright people; to influence them, we must possess the highest standards of character ourselves.”

These reports marked the first moment in which Europeans were compelled to question the narrative of their own civilizational superiority. China was not, as previously assumed, a barbaric, backward, or chaotic society. At first, missionaries conjectured that the Chinese were preserving a vestige of the ancient monotheistic tradition descending from Noah. However, upon realizing that the Chinese traced their teachings not to foreign prophets but to indigenous ancestors, the missionaries were forced to account for Chinese moral and social achievements through reason alone. As Thomas Aquinas had articulated, it appeared that the Chinese, by the power of reason, had reached many truths ordinarily attributed to divine revelation — constructing a flourishing civilization without the aid of prophetic guidance.

Yet, despite their profound moral development, the Chinese conception of the divine fell short of European expectations: they believed not in a personal Creator God, but in an immanent, impersonal cosmic principle. This absence of a theistic framework deeply disappointed the missionaries. Recognizing that neither a religious nor a military conquest of China was feasible given the latter’s overwhelming superiority, Matteo Ricci adopted a strategic approach: he presented Confucianism, the foundational doctrine of Chinese governance, not as a religion but as a philosophy, and Confucius himself as a rational philosopher akin to Aristotle. He argued that the Five Classics, revered texts in Chinese tradition, could be regarded as the Chinese equivalent of sacred scriptures, and that the concept of Tian corresponded to the Christian notion of God. Practices that might seem idolatrous to a Christian observer — such as the veneration of ancestors and ritual offerings to spirits — Ricci framed as civil and political customs, rather than religious worship. In portraying China as a monotheistic, moral, and civilized “pagan” society, Ricci subtly departed from the traditional Western view that morality and culture must be rooted in divine revelation. Thus, he inadvertently laid the groundwork for a novel concept in Western thought: the idea of a secular domain independent of religion.

Ricci’s depiction of a rational, theistic China generated great excitement within the Vatican. However, missionaries who followed in his footsteps encountered a reality that diverged significantly from Ricci’s optimistic portrayal. They reported that Confucianism, the doctrine that shaped Chinese governance and society, amounted to a form of atheism or deism, while the more popular traditions of Daoism and Buddhism were characterized by elements of idolatry.

Although Ricci’s narrative was warmly received by proponents of the Thomistic (Aquinas-inspired) Catholic tradition — especially those seeking to counter Protestant critiques — its unintended consequences would only fully manifest in later centuries.

From China To Europe: The Story Of The Liberation Of Reason

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe’s search for an escape from the chaos and crisis engulfing the continent led Enlightenment thinkers to trace the roots of this turmoil to the subordination of reason to revelation. For deist thinkers — who argued that reason should concern itself with worldly affairs, while revelation should be confined to theology and worship — China emerged as a dangerous yet alluring example, demonstrating that morality and political order could flourish independently of divine revelation, and that reason could succeed without recourse to sacred authority. This perspective did not merely contribute to the separation of church and state; it laid the foundations for a new conceptual architecture in Europe — the separation of the sacred and the profane, the very essence of secularism.

Some missionaries dispatched to China, influenced by these unfolding debates, returned with reports asserting that the Chinese were not deists or monotheists, but atheists. Such claims provided potent arguments for Enlightenment figures like Pierre Bayle, who moved along the frontier between skepticism and atheism.

Thus, China came to represent not only the possibility of separating church and state but also the invention of a secular sphere entirely independent of religious authority — a revolutionary idea for the European imagination. In other words, China served as an inspirational model for the emergence of the distinction between the sacred and the profane realms. This conceptual shift shattered Augustine’s revelation-centered worldview, simultaneously elevating reason to a position of supreme authority. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a period of admiration for the East — and especially for China — had dawned among Enlightenment thinkers. Figures such as Voltaire and Leibniz held up China as a model for Europe, emphasizing its system of governance grounded in reason and merit. Indeed, China’s example played a pivotal role in shaping Europe’s transition into the modern world. However, with the triumph of secular thought and the rise of the modern West, China’s catalytic role was gradually forgotten. The East, once a source of admiration and inspiration, was eventually relegated to the forgotten and dust-laden recesses of history, treated as little more than a tool that had outlived its usefulness.

Conclusion

Although China and Confucianism did not directly construct secular thought, they exerted an indirect yet profound influence on its realization. During Europe’s secularization process, China served Enlightenment thinkers both as a source of inspiration and as an instrument of paradigm shift. The rational and ethical orientation of Confucianism, the clear separation between religious and political spheres, the Chinese system of bureaucratic meritocracy, and the pervasive social order compelled European intellectuals to reassess their traditional Christian-centered worldview.

The observations made by Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit missionaries in China shook the theological dogmas of Europe, demonstrating that political governance and social order could indeed be constructed independently of religious authority. This realization paved the way for the rapid rise of intellectual movements such as atheism, deism, and secularism during the Enlightenment. Thinkers like Voltaire and Leibniz held up the Chinese model as compelling evidence that a society shaped by reason and virtue could thrive without dependence on religious dogma. Thus, the discourses developed through the lens of China significantly contributed to the entrenchment of key elements of the secular worldview in Europe — particularly the notions of the separation of religion and state and the existence of a non-religious public sphere.

By the nineteenth century, however, China’s role in Western thought began to fade into obscurity. Europe’s military and economic ascendancy, fueled by the Industrial Revolution, replaced earlier admiration with Orientalist and evolutionist discourses. China came to be perceived not as an exemplar of reasoned governance but as a “developing” or “backward” civilization, and the intellectual contributions it had inspired during the Enlightenment were gradually effaced from memory.

In conclusion, China’s impact on Enlightenment thought serves as a compelling example of the cross-cultural and transnational character of the history of modern ideas. The development of secularism in the West cannot be fully understood merely through the lens of internal European reforms and conflicts; it must also be situated within the context of Europe’s encounters with the outside world — especially with ancient civilizations like China. Exploring these interactions offers a powerful corrective to traditional intellectual historiography, giving voice to the long-silenced “other” and restoring to it the dignity, recognition, and historical significance it rightly deserves.