An Inter-Cultural Prism. The Representation of the Belief in the Atheism of the Chinese as a Play of Mirror between the Society of Jesus and Philosophes

About the presumed Chinese atheism, affirmed, denied or attenuated during the controversy on the Chinese Rites, the religious orders’ different interpretations clashed in China and above all in Europe, in a discussion in which Enlightenment thought, French especially, took part. If it was widely assumed that a lack of faith, even more than the practice of a wrong belief, influenced in a nearly deterministic manner a person’s outer and inner behaviour, one should ask whether and by how much the negative and horrible representation of the atheist’s human qualities – all the religions acknowledging by definition the atheist as the ‘other’ – contributed to weaken the Confucian atheist’s archetypal perception. The Confucian as described by the Society of Jesus – with his moral values, his governance aimed at the public good, the relevance he gave to science and culture – was neatly and obviously contrasting the representation of an atheist that had developed in European publications and essays. This might have curbed the atheist view of Confucianism itself.