Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge

A contemporary scholar of Chinese philosophy wrote, “myths often contain an element of historical truth, and what passes for historical truth often has mythical elements.”[1] By implication, not everything that seems to be historically valid in a religious story is, for it is fair-game in that genre to assuage and even invent “historical” events to make theological points. Lest it be thought that histories are written objectively, it should not be forgotten that historical accounts are written by human beings, and thus are subject to our limitations, including bias. Nevertheless, religious stories, or myth, and historical accounts are different genres of writing, and have very different purposes and criteria. To conflate the two genres, or, moreover, any other domain with that of religion, is to deny the uniqueness of religion (as well as that of other, even related domains). Religion and ethics, for instance, are two, admittedly very closely related, domains of human experience.

Ethics is the field concerned with what a person should do, whereas religion goes beyond conduct to include, and be based on, the experience of transcendence that goes beyond, or is oriented to, beyondness. Religious mystics, such as Ramakrishna in the 1800s and Gertrude in a medieval monastery, would in all likelihood agree with Pseudo-Dionysius’s claim that religion goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). More precisely, religion, while being in our world, transcends it and does so inherently. Knowledge of the source, or infinite remainder, of religion inherently eludes us finite, corporeal beings, whereas knowledge currently beyond our grasp in domains such as politics, economics, the weather, and the other sciences can potentially be known by us. This qualitative epistemological difference is just one way of grasping why the domain of religion is unique, and thus warrants its own criteria, rather than any overreaching from historians and scientists. To be sure, the arrow goes both ways; distinctly religious criteria cannot legitimately dominate in the fields of history and natural science. Such overreaching in both directions has been the blight of religion especially in the last millennium at least in Europe.

To be sure, certain other domains are very closely related to that of religion. After all, five of the Ten Commandments contain ethical content, albeit crucially of a divine command rather than a human’s ethical theory. Recognizing that divine commands are not bound in principle to our notions of conduct that is ethical (or unethical), as Kierkegaard makes clear in Fear and Trembling in which Abraham’s attempted religious sacrifice of Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of attempted murder, it is legitimate to include religion in ethical analysis.

For example, whether knowledge is of the transcendent sort or merely potential, it is important not to overreach in what we think we know. This vice may be called epistemological arrogance. In fact, to Confucius, “knowledge (zhi) is to know what one knows and doesn’t know (2.17, 19.5). Such knowledge, in turn, enables one to learn (xue) what one doesn’t know.”[2] The arrogance in thinking one knows more than one does diminishes the knowledge that a person can potentially acquire. Hence, Confucius states in Analects 9.8, “The Master said, ‘Do I possess an all-knowing cognizance? I do not. If a simple fellow asks me a question, my mind at first is a complete blank, and I have to knock at both sides [of the question] until everything has been considered [and some clarity begins to emerge].’”[3] That is, Confucius (Kongzi) “did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.”[4] Intellectual humility is like a cup viewing itself as empty and thus as able to be filled; additional knowledge must overflow from an already-full cup.

Such humility is especially valuable when it is applied to knowledge in the religious domain, for to lapse there into overreaching as if a person could be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing), is to engage in self-idolatry. This is not so regarding knowledge in other domains. Therefore, the method that Confucius urges for earthly knowledge in those other domains pertains all the more when the human mind enters the domain of religion. Incidentally, to project self-idolatry onto intellectual arrogance in another domain is an example of religious criteria (and meaning) overreaching at the expense of the native criteria (and meaning) of the other domains.

I contend that with respect to religion, given the mind’s proclivity to overreach epistemologically (i.e., thinking one knows more than one does in a certain subject), it is prudent to be  ever vigilant in distinguishing religious belief, which is compatible with faith, from knowledge of divine things, which excludes faith and is ultimately self-contradictory because the essence of divinity is inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. Analects 2.17 refers to a statement ostensibly made by Confucius himself: “The Master said, ‘You [Zilu], do you know what I have been trying to teach you? To say that you know something when you know it and to say that you do not know something when you do not know it—this is true knowing[zhi].”[5] To be able to say what one knows and admit what one does not (yet) know is premised on knowing where the line between the two is. This in turn is premised on valuing knowledge. In Analects 19.5, “Zixia said, ‘To be aware each day of what you still don’t know and to remember after a month what you were able to absorb—this is proof of your love for learning.’”[6] A love of learning can be intuited by a person’s carefulness in making clear to others the limits of one’s knowledge.

In the religious domain, all that translates into resisting the temptation to presume to know not only what God is in itself (i.e., the essence of divinity), but also what God wants or wills and furthermore that God’s will must surely be behind some event in the world. To know that God caused an earthquake, for instance, lies beyond our ability to discern, and yet such overreaching has not been uncommon. To know that it is God’s will that a close relative dies at a certain time is similarly presumptuous, epistemologically, whereas to have faith, and thus a belief, that the loved one is in a better place fits with the human situs in the realm of religion. In stark contrast, to declare that the person is in a better place is dogmatic, and may say more about the psychology of the person making the statement than anything religious. Whereas a person enunciating more about economics or politics than the person actually knows is just pedantic, presuming to know that which lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perspective, and emotions in principle is of a sort of arrogance that is foisted by an utter self-contradiction: knowledge of that which is inherently beyond the limits of human knowledge. In trying to be akin to God, a human being flies too high and thus inevitably falls on one’s face. Humanity’s grasp of what divinity actually is may be more misguided than we assume. How, for example, is divine, theological love qualitatively different (i.e., unique) from the garden-variety love evinced typically in our world? It is easy to draw on psychology and metaphysics instead of looking below to a distinctly theological sort of love. Augustine’s notion of caritas love in his Confessions is soaked in emotion, and the Christian notion of divine agape love as self-emptying love is typically thought of metaphysically rather than distinctly theologically.

It is ironic that Confucius’s epistemological ethic can be so useful in how a person can approach religion as such. To be clear, in the Analects, Confucius is discussing knowledge that a person can potentially have. Such knowledge is not of the transcendent; in the religious domain, knowledge extends only so far and then belief must take over. This does not mean that the method proposed by Confucius cannot be used by people in discerning the limits of knowledge in matters of religion. The human susceptibility to over-reach in such matters even though faith is tacitly sacrificed in the process is so commonly exploited that more vigilance in distinguishing what one knows from what one does not know is needed. Divine revelation is by definition pristine, but it should not be forgotten that it must go through our atmosphere—or as through a smoky, stained-glass window—to reach us. Put another way, we are hardly pristine receptors, and yet we presume so to be even as we implicitly import psychology and metaphysics in essentially remaking divinity into something more familiar to the mind. David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion gets at the anthropomorphism that the human mind inevitably hangs on divine simplicity. For example, it is much more difficult for us to grasp the Christian theological notion of the Logos than its incarnation as a god-man because the latter is literally more familiar to us than is God’s creative rationale in Creation. To transcend a familiar mask of eternity—to use Joseph Campbell’s term—and be suspended in the mystery of the transcendent that lies inherently beyond our reach (not to mention our human form) is admittedly scary, but also so necessary to getting past religion in human terms.[7]

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1. Bryan W. Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2011), p. 2.
2. Mary Sim, “Why Confucius’ Ethics is a Virtue Ethics,” The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed.s Michael A. Slote and Lorraine Besser-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2015), 63-76, p. 70.
3. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 133.
4. Analects 9.4, in Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 131.
5. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 20.
6. Ibid., p. 311.
7. This is essentially the thesis of my treatise, Godliness and Greed, which is published by Lexington Books. In my next book, God’s Gold, which unlike the first is written for a non-academic readership, I extend my thinking to how an anthropomorphic religion can be retained without the pitfalls of rendering the divine in so anthropomorphic terms.

Spirituality in the Workplace: Hindu and Christian Strategies

Mohan Vilas, a Hindu monk at Govardha Ecovillage, spoke at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025. He had gone from the world of financial derivatives to worshipping Krishna. Once he had fulfilled his “lower needs,” he looked for more. After obtaining a M.B.A. and while working in finance, he was hungry for knowledge beyond the world of business. So he studied ancient Vedic culture. His talk at the conference was on being an idealist surrounded by strategists. He addressed the question of whether the world allows individuals to practice virtue. Even when a person is not in a dysfunctional workplace or in a hostile society, the human mind struggles, Vilas said, to apply ethical virtues. Plato’s dictum that to know the good is enough do the good, and thus to be good, may be wildly optimistic, considering the instinctual force of urges in our nature to act immorally, even though other people are harmed as a result. It is even more difficult to get into a habit of doing good while “swimming upstream” in an ethically compromised workplace or an aggressive societal culture. An ethical Russian or Israeli soldier in the mid-2020s, for example, would have a lot of trouble refusing to bomb hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, and, moreover, invading another country and withholding food so to starve an occupied group. Such a soldier would be intolerable to both Putin and Netanyahu, respectively. Vilas’s question is the following: What happens when a person who is good is put into a selfish society? Must an ethical person finally inevitably exit a culture that rewards narrow selfishness, passive-aggression and deception?

Dostoevsky wrote when Russia was in crisis. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is an idealist who refuses to corrupt himself. It comes with a price: isolation.  If a society rejects moral purity, then what is valued? Myshkin is surrounded by schemers, but he is good nonetheless. His mere existence exposes the hypocrisy of those who are around him. He is identified as a problem by the corrupt. He is upsetting the balance in the social setting. He is viewed an active disturbance to be destroyed. If this sounds familiar, Jesus in the Gospel narratives is in the same dynamic. The very presence of an idealist is intolerable to sordid people who are used to manipulating other people. Being good is not beneficial in a dysfunctional societal (or organizational) culture in which cunningness is valued. Those who play fairly have a disadvantage relative to the corrupt manipulators because the latter have made the rules.

So, an idealist may be tempted to be a savvy Machiavellian strategist. Machiavelli wrote The Prince for rulers in a harsh international context. Not many people realize that his History of Florence includes the element of morality. Similarly, Adam Smith wrote not only The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the latter in which the professor of moral philosophy based his ethical theory founded on impartial sentiments in making moral judgments. However, Smith does not maintain that participants in a marketplace should be expected to act according to how others impartially feel about business conduct. Instead, the amoral and impersonal mechanism of “the invisible hand” gives aggregated self-interests of participants the unintended societal benefit of people working and obtaining goods and services. Smith accepts that market participants are self-seeking economic agents engaged in buying and selling rather than in being concerned for the economic welfare of others. That the invisible hand efficiently allocates goods and services in a competitive marketplace, which is a benefit of self-interests interacting, does not institute ethical business conduct by participants. In spite of the empirical studies claiming that acting ethically in business pays off financially, imperfect information can enable the unscrupulous to thrive.

Historically, Quakers in Europe and North America were known to be honest in business, and so they enjoyed trustworthy reputations.  This is not something that Smith counted on in writing about market competition in Wealth of Nations.

Even if Christianity had to some extend fostered ethical conduct, I submit that the advent of secularity in the West meant that the voluntary adoption of religious ethics in business could be less and less relied on. In India, I doubt that many Hindu merchants mimic the lack of concern for consequences in doing one’s caste’s duties that Krishna advocates to Arjuna concerning fighting in a military battle in the Bhagavad-Gita. A merchant could well protest that ignoring consequences in managing a business is a recipe for how to go out of business, in which case no one could get the goods or services provided by the business. It is more realistic to urge that the compassion enjoined by Krishna be practiced in the workplace, even if the workplace culture is toxic, and towards customers. Similarly, compassion to one’s detractors, as preached by Jesus in the Gospels, could gradually detoxify a dysfunctional organizational culture. Much stronger medicine, however, is expounded by Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the Christian theologian of New England, Jonathan Edwards, in a book on holiness. Whereas Edwards, in his sermon, “The Portion of the Righteous,” maintains that the elect are to enter the kingdom of God only after the Last Judgment (i.e., Christ’s Second Coming), Hopkins interprets the kingdom of God as being accessible to a person before physical death in so far as one is kind and compassionately helpful to people who dislike one and whom one dislikes.  This version goes beyond the benevolentia universalis of generalized “neighbor-love,” and can be much more powerful spiritually in turning around a passive-aggressive organizational culture. Inconvenient compassion issuing out in acts of kindness takes much more effort, as the internal resistance is more, but, if done, the spiritual and psychological dynamic between two or more people can be utterly transformed.

Realistically, however, good-hearted idealists can be all-too-easily “eaten up” by sharks that thrive in hostile, back-stabbing organizational cultures. Sometimes it is best to vote with one’s feet kick off the dirt from one’s sandals, and find another workplace in which to work. Life is too short to stay where one is hated and otherwise where too many people are hateful. In this regard, I found Yale and New Haven, Connecticut to be beyond repair in 2025. That the university’s police chief, who was Christian minister and alumnus of Yale’s divinity school, had accepted the invitation of the FBI to show Yale’s private police unit how to use counter-terrorism tactics on students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty and presumably even alumni back auditing a course, and that security guards were regularly spying on students on campus was enough for me to pull the plug. I even asked if it was possible to refuse a degree already granted. This was greeted with a passive-aggressive refusal to reply to my email. So, I voted with my feet and returned to Harvard. Better to vote on principle than stay and be inflicted with passive-aggression sans organizational accountability.

Regarding employees of organizations, whether private, governmental, or non-profit, walking away, if done by more people in dysfunctional organizations, could have an “Adam Smith” kind of impact whereby organizations having toxic workplaces go under while healthy organizations prosper. Voting with one’s feet in employment is utilized too seldomly because of the financial uncertainty involved, especially in cases in which an employee quits one job before having secured another. Even if doing one’s duty by performing functions of one’s caste, including that of merchants, is valued, this does not mean that a Hindu is duty-bound to remain working in a dysfunctional company. A person need not choose between Shankara’s method of total renunciation and staying in a toxic organization. A person can both remain employed and exercise enough initiative to get out of a bad working situation and into a healthy organization.

Secularized Religion in Nazi Ideology

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

Business and Religion: Financial Ethics Found Lacking in the Vatican's Institute of Religious Works

In probing corruption leads in the Vatican Bank, Italian financial police stumbled onto a plot in July 2012 to smuggle €20 million into Italy. The alleged culprits included a monsignor, a financial broker, and a former member of Italy’s secret service. For his part, the cleric was said to have had people pretend to give him donations of €560,000 so he could furtively pay the financial broker for his role. Crime, Italian politics, and the Vatican Bank: hardly a novel discordant tune even then. That not just any bank, but that of a church, could stray so far from what would reasonably be expected from a bank whose formal name is the Institute of Religious Works still boggles the mind. 
The intersection of ethics, religion and business is fraught with complexity.  A religious verdict from ethical premises is possible nevertheless. Generally speaking, religion does not boil down to ethics. John D. Rockefeller was unethical in restraining trade when he ran Standard Oil. Yet pressing the railroads for excessive rebates and drawbacks (compensation from the railroads serving other customers) does not de-legitimate the titan’s claim to have been a Christ-figure in saving “drowning” competitors. Theological inconsistency, rather than unethical conduct, would be needed to expunge Rockefeller’s industrial-religious identity. Such inconsistency can be found in Rockefeller having forced competitors unwilling to be bought out into bankruptcy; Jesus did not inflict harm on people who refused to follow him. Human ethical systems cannot limit God, which is omnipotent.
Divine-sourced ethical principles, such as those in the Ten Commandments, are regarded as religious in nature, rather than merely soured in a human ethical system. Accordingly, were Rockefeller to have broken one of the Ten Commandments in running Standard Oil, his commercial-religious identity could be assailed. In the case of Msgr. Scarano at the Vatican Bank, his clerical, not to mention Christian, identities are vulnerable to the allegations that he bore false witness and stole money from the Vatican. That Kant concluded from his ethical system that lying can never be ethical is irrelevant. However, that Kant’s categorical imperative can be re-stated as, Treat other rational beings not just as means, but also as ends in themselves, suggests that Kant’s theory can be understood as the Golden Rule, which is binding in religious terms. Hume’s theory that determining something as unethical “just is” the psychological sentiment of disapproval finds no such corresponding theological ethic and is thus invalid in assessing the commercial-religious identities of either Rockefeller or Scarano.
As with Rockefeller, the case of Scarano begs the question, how can a person so religiously inclined so delude oneself in such matters?  If driving a car well were important to me, I would be double sure that my driving is as flawless as possible. I would ask friends to ride along or follow me from behind to assess my driving. Were one of them to tell me that my passing skills leave much to be desired, I would work on them—maybe even take a driving lesson. Of course, no one can be a perfect driver. So too, Scarano cannot be sin-free. Even so, were I to be a really bad driver and yet represent myself as highly skilled, people would naturally wonder about my state of mind. At the very least, the sustained cognitive dissidence (i.e., allowing for or ignoring hypocrisy in one’s conduct) likely in Scarano’s mind raises the question of the clerical screening process for mental health.
Moreover, that the Institute for Religious Works has been embroiled in charges of corruption time and again suggests that cognitive dissidence has come to characterize the Vatican’s culture. Considering the questionable prioritizing of avoiding a scandal over defrocking and turning in rapist priests, a pattern of cognitive dissidence can be suspected. The question is perhaps what religious works would look like. From this answer, the question would pertain to how finance could be put into service without undercutting the religious nature of the works.
In conclusion, ethical conduct, religion and finance are a tricky business not easily disentangled. A preliminary point can nevertheless be made with some certainty. Specifically, unethical conduct does not necessarily invalidate a religious identity in a person’s commercial or financial role. The ethical principle would have to be part of a divine decree, such as in the Decalogue, to contradict the assumed commercial religiousity.  A human-constructed ethical theory or principle cannot by definition limit God’s omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful), whereas God’s making of a moral divine decree cannot contradict God’s nature, or essence. Both Rockefeller and Scarano can be found culpable in religious-ethical terms bearing on Christianity even though it is possible to be both unethical and religious without contradiction.

Source: Gilles Castonguay and Liam Moloney, "Vatican Bank Probe Leads to Three Arrests," The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2013

For more on Rockefeller's application of Christianity to his monopoly, as well as more generally the history of Christian thought on business, see my book, God's Gold, available at Amazon.

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The Evolution of Just War in Roman Catholic Social Ethics: The Case of Libya

According to The Catholic Herald, there were originally only three conditions laid down by Thomas Aquinas for a just war. According to The Catholic Herald, “The Church later added two more rules, though St Thomas usually gets the credit for them (and why not?). The first is that the conflict must be a last resort. The Catholic Herald describes the last criterion of Catholic just war theory as follows: “Lastly, the war must be fought proportionally. 

The full essay is at "The Evolution of Just War in Roman Catholic Social Ethics." 

On changing theological takes on greed in relation to money and business, see God's Gold, available at Amazon.

Christianity and “Social Capitalism”

The SEC charged Ephren Taylor with a fraudulent $11 million Ponzi scheme in April 2012. According to Reuters, “Taylor fraudulently sold $7 million of notes said to bear 12 percent to 20 percent annual interest rates, to fund small businesses such as laundries, juice bars and gas stations.” He “had conducted a multi-city ‘Building Wealth Tour’ in which he spoke to congregations” on the importance of “giving back.” He called himself a “social capitalist.” In actuality, he used the money on himself and his wife’s attempt to become a singer.

The full essay is at "Christianity and 'Social Capitalism'"

See: God's Gold, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Source:

Jonathan Stempel, “SEC Charges Ephren Taylor II ForAllegedly Bilking Churchgoers In $11 Million Ponzi Scheme,” The Huffington Post, April 12, 2012.

Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical

The spiritual business leader who searches for personal and profes-sional integration is the chief beneficiary of this booklet, which can also be taken for a way to promulgate meagerly a new theory on the phenomenon of religion that stresses its uniqueness and distinctiveness. I begin with spirituality in order to find cleave distinctive nature off any reduction to ethics. In distinguishing spirituality from ethics, I look at religious experience of transcendence as a more suitable basis for spirituality. Next I’ll look at the business literature on spiritual leadership—scholarship that conflates such leadership with ethical leadership. I extract residue from that extant literature that can serve as a launching pad for an account of spiritual leadership that is grounded in transcendent religious experience.

The book: Spiritual Leadership in Business

God's Gold: Beneath Shifting Sands

The book traces the historical shift in Christian attitudes toward profit-seeking and wealth. Through the centuries, the dominant position shifted from anti-wealth to pro-wealth, meaning that the coupling of greed to profiting and accumulating wealth was at first thought to be very tight, but then loosened--eventually to the extent that a camel could get through the eye of the needle. With both anti-wealth Luther and pro-wealth Calvin living in the same economic context, the commercialization of Europe cannot fully explain the shift. As one possibility, a bias in a core theological doctrine may have been subtly tilting the ground in the pro-wealth direction. If so, the implications for Christianity, and for religion more generally as a phenomenon, would be nothing short of earth-shaking.