Be Thou My Vision
Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.
[…]
Be Thou my battle shield, sword for the fight;
Be Thou my dignity, Thou my delight;
Thou my soul’s shelter, Thou my high tower;
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.
When the offering was collected in the church service, I joined the brothers and sisters in singing the hymn “Be Thou My Vision,” and tears streamed down my face.
It was the fourth time I had wept since coming to the United States.
A Rational Retrospective
At twenty, I resolved to become a renowned scholar. I decided to sit for the entrance examination to the then-fashionable graduate program in aesthetics—reportedly the first student from my department to do so straight from undergraduate studies. The Party secretary even personally delivered my personnel file to Sichuan Normal University.
Yet after four years of rigorous study, I found myself increasingly confused about what the discipline of aesthetics was actually supposed to study. Although I had once produced a lengthy ontological essay titled The Birth of Aesthetics, I gradually realized that I had lost clarity about the field itself.
While translating part of General Theory of Aesthetics by the Japanese aesthetician Takeuchi Toshio, I encountered his assertion that art—one of aesthetics’ primary objects of study—is the product of human sensibility. If so, how could one use rationality alone to analyze something born of the senses? This question stayed with me until 1997. During those years, various friends encouraged me to pursue art criticism or aesthetic research, but I felt that art, the object of both disciplines, was not something that could be critiqued or studied rationally. This was perhaps one reason why; after graduating in 1990, I turned instead to the study of the “logic of history.”
The allure of fame continued to pull me forward. In 1993, filled with lofty ideals, I completed The Logic of Japanese History, which received the endorsement of the eminent scholar Bian Chongdao, who graciously wrote the preface. Two years later the book was published, and I sent copies to libraries in Japan, Germany, and the United States, as well as to respected scholars in China. To my disappointment, there was little response. The book, which I had imagined would cause a sensation and soon be translated into Japanese, sank without a trace.
It had been partly self-financed and partly supported by a friend. Sixteen years later, about a hundred copies still lay under my bed until a friend took pity and bought them for ten yuan apiece. Eventually, I even received a call asking if I wanted to purchase several copies online.
At the time, I was convinced I had discovered why Japan’s postwar economy had soared and why Meiji Restoration reforms had veered toward militarism. I even believed I had understood why China’s Self-Strengthening and the Hundred Days’ Reform had failed. I was twenty-eight then.
Having witnessed the vanity of the so-called academic circles, I nonetheless found within research itself a strange kind of hope.
After studying the logic of Japanese history, I came to understand clearly why, as a nation, the Japanese respected the Chinese before the Meiji Restoration, the Europeans before World War II, and the Americans after Japan’s defeat—yet by the 1960s, during their economic surge, regarded themselves as supreme. For generations, they had claimed that the emperor was a descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and that they were a people under the emperor’s divine providential protection.
If such a deity could not err, then whatever was done under his divine commands could not be unrighteous. It was all framed as liberating the peoples of East Asia from Western colonial oppression. During World War II, the Japanese saw themselves as “saviors.” By deifying the emperor—making him a living god (arahitogami)—they granted themselves a transcendent theological basis for elevating their nation above all others and shaped the logic to make Yamato people to be deified. This, I realized, was the root of the Japanese people’s collective pride. Implicitly, it revealed the inevitability of pride within any nationalist outlook.
By contrast, absolute humility becomes possible only through the Christian doctrine that the resurrected Jesus Christ is the sole mediator between humanity and God. Because Christ—the Word made flesh—lives even now, no human being can bypass him, proclaim himself divine, sit at his right hand, or take his place in executing righteousness. Whether a prodigy or a historic hero, each person is still a creature standing with two feet on the earth, casting only a shadow a few meters long.
Moreover, Jesus Christ commands us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Humans can only bow low upon the earth, living, moving, and having their being in reverent awe. Through Jesus Christ, a human becomes truly human, and God remains God—this is the foundation of justice in human life.
Thus, the just order of the world where humans live is established. The fundamental relational elements of existence—language, space-time, self, nature, society, history, and the sacred—find their proper place through humanity’s relationship with God in Christ:
- Language becomes a dwelling place, not a tool to be exploited.
- Time and space become grounds for rest, not mechanisms for ceaseless striving.
- The individual in self becomes something to be formed, not consumed.
- Nature becomes something to steward, not conquer.
- Others in society become fellow beings-with, not objects of revolution.
- Tradition in history becomes something to inherit, not discard.
- And the so-called “sacred,” apart from God, is only the magnified projection of human pride—an idol.
All of this finds its ultimate grounding in the Christian faith in the triune God. Once these rational obstacles were cleared away, I resolved to live humbly as a human being before God.
The Presence of Salvation
To improve my English and prepare for studying abroad, I began attending a Thursday night Bible study at the home of a Canadian couple, Bill and Shirley. We were reading Warren W. Wiersbe’s Be Series commentary on Galatians. Each week I brought up difficult questions: “If God created humankind, how did he create the Chinese in history?” “If Christians possess God’s wisdom, why can’t you answer such questions clearly?”
Bill would patiently flip through his Bible for verses, lend me books such as One Hundred Problems in the Bible or Thirteen Disciples Who Changed History, or simply pray that I might humbly seek wisdom from above. After some time, I realized he could not fully answer my questions, yet I continued attending.
Perhaps it was because the sisters there radiated joy, their faces bright as if washed by light; or because, after each meeting, the group would gently carry a short-statured girl down the stairs, while Bill and Shirley stood nearby, seeing everyone off with eyes full of compassion and equality. From that gaze, I began to sense emotionally—though not yet rationally—the moral beauty of faith in Jesus Christ.
At the end of 1994, they decided to return to their home country. I had been deeply moved by their Christian love, and in the months that followed, I received guidance and help in Bible study from a Christian brother from Mali and a Christian sister from Germany. Influenced by the words of Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace, I reasoned that since God had not moved me to kneel down and hear him personally say, “You must receive baptism,” it should be enough simply to believe in my heart.
On the day of my baptism the following October, just before National Day, the Malian brother—himself a descendant of royalty—read Matthew 28:19–20: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Since I believed, I knew I ought to obey the command of Jesus Christ Himself. I plunged headfirst into the water; when I rose, the sky was still the same sky, and I heard no voice from above. But I had received grace and become a Christian.
Only many years later did I understand that to be able to receive baptism and enter the kingdom of Christ Jesus is to be passive within the appearance of human initiative. Though a person seems to decide actively, in truth this has been foreordained before the foundation of the world.
I continued to harbor ambitious plans to write a multi-volume work titled The Logic of Human History, seeking to clarify why the histories of the world’s peoples had unfolded in one way rather than another, so that guidance could be offered for humanity’s future development. To read primary sources, I began studying French while continuing German, hoping to master several widely used world languages before turning forty.
In March 1995, after returning to my post from two years of unpaid leave, I began writing an introductory and foundational work that would articulate the logic of human history: History and Logic. After two years of day-and-night writing, I completed the roughly 400,000-word first volume in 1997. It began with human consciousness of time and how history comes into being; moved into value-laden speech and how logic is formed; and finally, through the relationship between history and logic, revealed a picture of the world. Grounded in language, the work was to have a second volume titled Language and the World, though the latter may forever remain only an outline—a dream never realized. I was thirty-one then.
I planned to publish the book within a year, convinced that it would be a “milestone” for human understanding of our present historical position. Yet publishing proved extraordinarily difficult. Because of the opinion of a Peking University scholar specializing in Chinese philosophy, Sanlian Press was the first to reject the manuscript; an editor even questioned me by phone, demanding to know why I had sought a recommendation letter from Professor Su Guoxun.
Professor Huang Kejian then referred the manuscript to China Youth Press, but it was rejected again for having “no market.” A Renmin University Press editor listened as I recounted the manuscript’s experience at Sanlian and returned it immediately. One printed copy was lost by a senior editor of People’s Publishing House during an office move; another was misplaced by the head of the editorial office of Commercial Press during an academic conference at Sichuan Normal University.
Finally, after ten years in storage at Bashu Press—and with one-fifth of the manuscript cut—it appeared under two titles: History and Logic—As a Religious Philosophy of Logic-history and The Cultural Logic of Humanitology: A Comparison among Metaphysics, Art, Religion, and Aesthetics.
Bashu Press is known for publishing classical texts; in other words, even before the two books reached readers, their association with the press had already consigned them to the category of “classics”—books belonging to the past. I had long anticipated this outcome and no longer regarded academic scholarship as the foundation of my life.
The unfortunate reception of The Logic of Japanese History more than a decade earlier had made me keenly aware that the humanities would forever remain in decline in a China transitioning from a premodern to a modern society. This realization led me to see the potential value of contemporary art criticism in an age dominated by image-based communication.
This was one of the reasons why, beginning in October 1997, I became involved in contemporary art criticism and, in 1998, began editing the series Humanities and Art. Another reason was the lure of reputation.
Conclusion
Reason revealed my limits; grace taught me to bow down. In Christ, humanity becomes truly human—and I, too, began to learn what it means to live as one.
Next in the series: “Calling and Shepherding”—on pastoral calling, struggle, and discernment through the Spirit’s leading at the “Trinity Bookstore” in Chengdu.
This article was originally written in Chinese and translated to English with permission by the ChinaSource team.
