Abstract
Today, ecumenism is once again reconsidered in a global context, for it remains relevant in social, political, economic and cultural fields. Its relevance is deemed to apply quite extensively to world governance and global collaboration in particular. The discussion hereby aims to look at the idealistic uses and the historical facts attached to ecumenism, and specifies the sense of compassion, the virtue of humaneness and the teleology of harmony. Moreover, it perceives harmony as being essential to what made ecumenical policies possible in the past, and still makes them possible at the present.
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Notes
- 1.
The Chinese notion of tian-xia is rendered in English by all under Heaven, all below Heaven, all-under-Heaven, or all-under-sky, etc.
- 2.
Sebastian Harnisch, “China’s Historical Self and Its International Role”, in S. Harnisch and J.-C. Gottwald (eds.), China’s International Roles: Challenging or Supporting International Order? (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 39–40.
- 3.
The Historical Records (Shi ji) by Sima Qian is also rendered as The Records of the Historian in the Han.
- 4.
Sima Qian, “Qu Yuan and Jia Yi”, in The Historical Records.
- 5.
Sima Qian, “Peace and Development Documents”, in The Historical Records.
- 6.
Shan’xi Institute of Archeology, Xi Han jingshi cang [The Capital Barns of the Western Han Dynasty] (Beijing: Cultural Relics Press, 1990). Also see Zhang Kaisheng, “Han dai liangcang chu tan” [An Initial Inquiry into the Barns of the Han Dynasty], in the Zhongyuan Wenwu [Journal of Cultural Relics in Central China], No. 1, 1986.
- 7.
Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 589.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 591–592.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 593.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 595.
- 11.
Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda, Choose Life: A Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- 12.
Holy Bible (Nanking: National TSPM & CCC, 2000), Deuteronomy 30.19.
- 13.
Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenical Age (ed. Michael Franz, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 352.
- 14.
Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenical Age, p. 354.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 361.
- 16.
Ibid., pp. 361–362.
- 17.
Sima Qian, “The Huns”, in The Historical Records.
- 18.
Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World, pp. 594–595.
- 19.
Wang Keping, “Humane Governance and Pragmatic Reason”, in Wang Keping, Rediscovery of Sino-Hellenic Ideas (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2016), pp. 159–165.
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Wang, K. (2019). Harmonism and Ecumenism. In: Harmonism as an Alternative. Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3564-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3564-8_11
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