- APF
Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, Lyon 1844
- MEP
Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris
Late Chosŏn Korea was a country almost completely cut off from external contacts. This was the result of a deliberate policy of seclusion – a pragmatic response to the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century, and those of the Manchu in 1627 and 1632. As far as the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty was concerned, the Korean government acknowledged the suzerainty of the Chinese state through its policy of ‘serving the great’ (sadae), while a policy of ‘good neighbourliness’ (kyoron) was adopted towards the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. Official contact with the outside world was largely limited to occasional embassies to Japan conveying felicitations on the accession of a new shogun, and more significantly the annual tribute and calendar missions to Beijing, occurring around the time of the winter solstice, which confirmed the fact of China's suzerainty over Korea. External trade was limited and officially controlled, and there was no Canton or Nagasaki to provide a window on the wider world.Footnote 1 As Korean diplomats informed the Tsungli Yamen in 1866, Korea adhered strictly to the ‘permanent canon of the vassal state’, namely that the ‘people have no foreign relations, they close their market, and they jeer at foreign tongues’.Footnote 2
Chosŏn society was dominated by a scholar-bureaucrat elite, usually known as yangban, which maintained its political power through a monopoly of an examinations system giving access to government posts, and modelled on that of Ming China. Below the yangban were the yangin or sangmin, commoners who bore the burden of taxation, military service and corvée labour, and a class of specialist officials, the chungin. These chungin, who provided technical services such as medicine, astronomy and translation, formed a ‘half-nobility’, with skills and scholarly attainments matching those of the yangban. However, they were excluded from the examinations system and therefore from political power, as were the secondary sons of yangban (sŏja). Of the nine classes of chungin, the interpreters (yŏkkwan) were accorded the highest status since they had contact with foreigners, especially the Chinese, and helped to negotiate matters of national importance. As with the other social groupings, the chungin were an endogamous status group, which handed down their skills only to their own children. At the very bottom of society were the ch' ŏnmin, the ‘base people’, who included Buddhist monks and nuns, shamans and private and public slaves.Footnote 3
Chosŏn Korea was religiously pluralistic with an indigenous tradition characterised in part by shamanistic practice, and two imported traditions, Mahāyāna Buddhism and Confucianism. With the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392, Buddhism was eclipsed as the guiding philosophy of the ruling class by Chu-Hsi Neo-Confucianism, which was elevated to the position of state orthodoxy and became central to a policy of social reformation instigated at the beginning of the period.Footnote 4 Confucianism sees the world in terms of a series of hierarchical relationships, and the maintenance of the proper interactions between them. Of particular importance is the respect to be accorded to one's elders and to one's ancestors, in the latter case through the performance of the ancestral rites. Chu Hsi's synthesis of the teaching of the Neo-Confucian schools added a formalised metaphysical dimension to the understanding of the significance of these ethical and social relationships.Footnote 5 In Chosŏn Korea, Neo-Confucianism became the primary social influence, affecting commoners as well as nobles. Koreans took pride in their strict adherence to, and interpretation of, Neo-Confucianism, particularly in distinction to the barbarian parvenu Manchu; Confucian values therefore penetrated more fully into Korean society than anywhere else in east Asia.Footnote 6
I
This was the society into which Christianity was introduced in the late eighteenth century: closed, hierarchical and quintessentially Neo-Confucian in its morals and ethics. It was also a society facing increasing insecurity and instability brought about, in part, by the political weakness of the late Chosŏn dynasty. Since the late seventeenth century, political power had become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few high royal officials. As a result, discontented groups of excluded officials and low-ranking bureaucrats formed in the countryside, and these in turn led to the establishment of reformist groups of scholars, such as the Sirhak p'a (School of practical learning).Footnote 7 In addition late Chosŏn Korea appears to have been facing a severe demographic crisis. From the middle years of the eighteenth century, floods, famines and epidemics exacerbated an already declining growth rate in a population that no longer seems to have been replacing itself.Footnote 8 Faced with such apparently intractable problems, certain yangban intellectuals began to question the validity of established traditions. Among them Chŏng Yag-yong (1762–1836), who wrote under the name of Tasan, sought for an omniscient deity to keep man on the narrow path of virtue and found this in the Sangje (Lord of Heaven) of Confucian scripture.Footnote 9 At a popular level, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed outbreaks of Buddhist millenarianism, as individuals appeared claiming to be the future Buddha, Maitreya.Footnote 10 Both the intellectual quest for a monothistic deity to provide a moral compass and the popular desire for a saviour figure to ward off a rising tide of evil and suffering may have done much to prepare the ground for the introduction of Catholicism.Footnote 11
II
Ironically Catholicism's entry into Korea came through the medium of the annual mission to Beijing, and as a result of the intellectual curiosity of a group of Sirhak-p'a scholars. In 1784 Yi Sŭng-hun returned from Beijing having been baptised by a member of the resident Catholic mission. He had sought out the priests at the instigation of his friend, Yi Pyŏk, who had been a member of a meeting of Sirhak-p'a scholars held in 1777, which had examined scientific, mathematical and religious treatises written by the Jesuits in China. Both men began to evangelise among their friends and relatives. Most of the earliest converts were members of the Namin political faction and followers of the philosophy of Yi Ik (1682–1764), a major figure in the Sirhak-p'a. These Catholic Namin took advantage of their common philosophical concerns and ties of marriage and politics with fellow Namin to propagate their faith. Their activities, however, quickly brought opposition from other Confucian scholars – in particular non-Catholic Namin disciples of Yi Ik – and aroused the suspicions of the authorities.Footnote 12 In 1785 Yi Pyŏk and other Christians were arrested at a meeting in the house of the chungin Kim Pŏm-u, a Chinese language interpreter. All were subsequently released, apart from Kim Pŏm-u who was severely beaten and sent into exile where he died from his injuries. In 1791 two cousins, Yun Chi-ch'ung and Kwŏn Sang-yŏn, were arrested and executed for their refusal to perform the ancestral rites for Yun's dead mother.Footnote 13 Despite these setbacks, the Church had grown to around 4,000 members by the time Fr Chou Wên-mu, a Chinese priest, arrived in Seoul in 1795. Under Fr Chou's ministry, and with the assistance of members of the laity, the Church continued to grow, numbering around 10,000 at the outbreak of the Sinyu persecution in 1801.Footnote 14
The Sinyu persecution claimed the lives of Fr Chou and at least 300 of the laity, and set the tone for the first century of the Church's existence. The Korean authorities moved, in 1801, from a policy characterised by persuasion and inducements to one of severe penalties and executions as the dowager queen, Chŏng-sun, used association with Catholicism as a weapon to eliminate her political opponents. The severity of the persecution was further exacerbated by the seizure of a letter written by Hwang Sa-yŏng which called for intervention in Korea by the Manchu and European states. Catholicism now appeared not only as a challenge to moral and ideological orthodoxy, but as a potential fifth column threatening the Korean state.Footnote 15 Over the space of the next thirty years, the Church was plagued by sporadic and localised persecutions, the most serious of which were the Urhae (1815), mainly confined to Kyŏngsang province, and the Chŭnghae (1827), limited largely to Chŏlla province.Footnote 16 An unsuccessful attempt was made to send two Chinese priests from the diocese of Beijing in 1817 and the possibility was again mooted in 1826. However, it was not until 1833 that another Chinese priest, Fr Liu Fang-chi, entered the country. By this date, though, Beijing no longer had responsibility for the Korean mission: in September 1831 Korea had been given the status of a vicariate apostolic of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP). By the end of 1837, three MEP priests, Fr Maubant, Fr Chastan and Bishop Imbert were active in Korea, Fr Liu having been sent back to China in disgrace in 1836.Footnote 17 In January 1839 a series of arrests occurred in Seoul which heralded a period of persecution, falling mainly within the year Kihae, which saw the deaths of at least 117 of the laity and the three French missionaries by February 1840. Despite the Kihae persecution, as it is known, the Church entered a second period of sustained growth, with new missionaries coming into the country after 1845. In 1846 a Korean priest, Fr Kim Tae-gŏn, and eight of the laity were executed, but by the 1860s the future of the community appeared secure. Persecution had largely subsided, and Christians numbered between 18,000 and 23,000 souls. However, 1866 marked the beginning of a succession of unprecendentedly severe, widespread and intense persecutions sparked by foreign pressures on the borders of Korea, which threatened the very survival of the Church, and which continued until a halt was called in 1871. During the period of the Great Persecution, eight of the eleven French missionaries active in Korea were executed, and perhaps between 8,000 and 10,000 of the laity were killed or died from the effects of hunger and disease.Footnote 18
III
One of the defining features, therefore, of the history of the Catholic Church in Korea before the 1870s – and indeed until the end of the century – was recurrent and often severe persecution. Persecutions produced martyrs, and it is possible to trace the development of a cult surrounding the martyrs and confessors of the early Church in Korea, some of whom would be beatified and canonised subsequently. During persecutions, Christians faced not only the threat of death, but also the application of severe and sustained sessions of torture in order to force them to apostatise. Of the Kihae martyrs, Barbe Kim, who died in prison in the August, received 340 blows of the baton over six or seven sessions of torture. Cho Hae-sŏng, arrested and executed at Wŏnju, was beaten so severely that his flesh was torn to shreds, while in many places the bones protruded from his body. The teenage Yu Tae-ch'ŏl endured fourteen sessions of torture during which ‘his body became a single wound, his bones were broken, and his flesh was ripped to shreds’. At one point he was said to have torn off a fragment of his own flesh and taunted his tormentors with it; he was discreetly strangled in prison in October 1839.Footnote 19 Despite such treatment, not only those sources left by the Korean laity and the French missionaries, but also those of the Korean authorities, comment on the equanimity and willingness with which Christians could face the prospect of imprisonment, torture and death. Bishop Imbert noted with satisfaction in his journal the actions of six laywomen, living a communal life, who, hearing of the forbearance of Christian prisoners, voluntarily surrendered themselves in April 1839.Footnote 20 In the same month the queen regent was moved to remark that Christians ‘regard death as a glory: savages and animals never come to such a thing’, while further entries in the Sŭngjŏngwŏn Ilgi (Diary of the royal secretariat) for May state that: ‘Yi Kwang-hŭn and the woman Pak [Hŭi-sun] and their associates … have sworn to die rather than retract’; ‘Kim [Ŏb-i] … goes willingly to her death and has sworn never to amend’; ‘Kim [A-gi] … her greatest desire is to be executed quickly’.Footnote 21 Faced in 1839 with Christians who would willingly rather die than apostatise, Yi Chi-yen, president of the secretariat, could only comment that: ‘To love life and to avoid death is a sentiment common to humanity, but for them it is not so: the sword or fetters they regard as if they were going to a place of ease; demented men, demented women, in their madness they chase the wind.’Footnote 22
The aim here is to go beyond hagiographical approbation and Confucian incomprehension to examine how laymen and laywomen were able to accept and even court imprisonment, torture and ultimately death. An understanding of those factors which prepared and encouraged Christians in their pursuit of martyrdom is clearly of interest when considering not only the assimilation of Christian concepts and traditions surrounding martyrdom by Korean Christians, but also the extent to which their understanding of martyrdom was shaped and informed by indigenous ethical, religious and social systems. This task will be undertaken through a study of the 117 confessors and martyrs who can be identified as having died as a result of the Kihae persecution in 1839 and 1840. Further examples will be drawn as necessary from earlier persecutions, the seven men who died during 1841, and the eight lay victims of the brief persecution of 1846.Footnote 23 The Great Persecution of 1866 to 1871 has been excluded since the wholesale and indiscriminate bloodletting of the period sets it apart in scale and character from the preceding persecutions. Between 1866 and 1871 killings and deaths occurred in such numbers and on such a wide scale that martyrdom was no longer a matter of choice for the laity at least.Footnote 24 In the case of the earlier persecutions, for the most part, the simple fact of being a Christian did not necessarily bring a martyr's crown: even in 1839–40 the authorities moved slowly towards the imposition of capital sentences against lay Christians, and were willing to accept equivocal responses as signs of apostasy.Footnote 25
Most of the sources available for the study of the early Church in Korea were produced through the process of beatification and canonisation. In the case of the Kihae persecution, and indeed the early history of the Korean Catholic Church, the principal source is Charles Dallet's Histoire de l'église de Corée. This was published in 1874 and its purpose was to record the history of the Church in Korea and to demonstrate the sanctity of its confessors and martyrs. In this it relied extensively on the activities undertaken by Bishop Daveluy in response to the opening of the cause of the Martyrs of Korea in 1857. From that year until the early 1860s Daveluy collected translations of Chinese and Korean accounts of the martyrs and confessors and affidavits from eye-witnesses. Much had become known through the catechist and martyr, Pak Chong-wŏn, who had visited Christian prisoners in Seoul in 1839. Daveluy also began work on an introduction to the history of Korea and of the Korean martyrs. In writing his history Dallet drew extensively on Daveluy's account and other material, including the journal kept by Bishop Imbert between January and May 1839 that had been sent to Paris before 1863.Footnote 26 Two further collections of translated Korean government documents, which recorded the interrogations and executions of Christians during the persecutions of 1839/40, 1846 and 1866, were published in 1924 and 1925. Of these, the manuscript of the Sŭngjŏngwŏn Ilgi, at least, is available in facsimile.Footnote 27
IV
The clearest and most frequently articulated inspiration for the actions of the Kihae confessors and martyrs within the Christian sources was – unsurprisingly – religious. The opportunity to suffer and to receive martyrdom was seen by some of those who endured imprisonment and death as a special gift from God, which provided an unparalleled opportunity to expiate their sins and to repay the debt incurred through the atonement. Yi Kwang-nyŏl, in a final letter to his parents before his execution, contrasted his own lack of worth and ingratitude with God's mercy and Christ's redemptive act. Pak Chong-wŏn, contemplating a crucifix, meditated on Christ's love for him, ‘a miserable sinner’, and Christ's suffering and death. Just as Christ had suffered and died for him, it was proper that he too should suffer and die for Christ. Consequently, ‘the desire to be a martyr consumed his soul’.Footnote 28 Within this scheme a Christian's principal duty was to serve God; it was only natural therefore to endure trials and suffering since these ultimately came from God. This obligation to serve God was – as both the authorities and missionaries were keen to note – superior to the attachment to life itself. Nusia [Lucia] Kim, admitted to fearing death, but said that it would be necessary to renounce her God in order to live, and so – despite her fear – she desired to die. Son So-byŏk held that her life was not her own but a gift from God.Footnote 29
Others contrasted the corruption and transience of the mundane world with the eternal rewards promised in the next. Yi Sŏng-rye encouraged her tired and hungry children by telling them of the brevity of this life compared with the eternity of the future life, while Yu Chin-gil maintained that, in following the doctrine of the Europeans, an individual could escape the eternal torments of Hell and enjoy the eternal rewards of Heaven.Footnote 30 Yi Kwang-nyŏl, facing his own death, told his readers that ‘life is but an instant’ and dwelled upon the stark contrast between this world and the next, writing of the transience and vanity of a mundane world epitomised by the decay and dissolution of the body after death. Sin featured prominently: Kwang-nyŏl's accumulated sins were like mountain ranges, and for him (he was here echoing the words of the vernacular Chugyo Yoji [Essentials of the Lord's teaching] written by Chŏng Yak-chŏng in 1801) the world, the flesh and the devil were the three most pressing dangers faced by the believer, of which the flesh was the most dangerous.Footnote 31
A consistent spiritual ethos therefore underlay the actions of the martyrs. This held the world to be imperfect, transient and corrupting, regarded suffering as part of God's plan, and viewed a martyr's death both as a release and as a means to repay the debt owed to God. In its essentials this was distilled from the ‘Tridentine’ Catholicism of contemporary France, and it is interesting to note the extent to which – within fifty years of the Church's foundation – members of the Korean laity had not only internalised these values, but could deploy them systematically in order to present an individual's suffering and death as part of a wider conflict between good and evil with eternal life as the reward.Footnote 32 Adherence to these values, and the wish to emulate other confessors and martyrs, engendered a positive desire for martyrdom which, according to Nam Myŏng-hyŏk, should be accepted ‘like a lamb’.Footnote 33 Martyrdom was to be welcomed, whether as a special benefit or gift from God, a short-cut to salvation or as a means to atone for past sins, and once set on that course it was incumbent on a confessor to endure to the end. Myŏng-hyŏk stated that if, in the next world, he was ‘known as Damien Nam of the confraternity of the Holy Scapular, martyr for God’, his desires would have been fulfilled.Footnote 34 The six women who surrendered themselves in April 1839 were given a beating and left to reflect in prison for five days. The magistrate then questioned them again as to their resolve: ‘Our resolution is fixed: treat us according to the law’, they replied.Footnote 35 In 1846 Im Ch'i-baek saw martyrdom as the path to salvation, and reasoned that it was impossible to renounce his God. Interestingly he stated too that he had promised to die with Fr Kim Tae-gŏn, and this reference hints at other less clearly articulated influences acting to inform and strengthen the resolve of potential martyrs.Footnote 36
V
One important point, of course, is that martyrs are extraordinary: they are a religious elite and so may be expected to appear from the ranks of the more devout and committed Christians. The Korean authorities too seem to have become more selective in making arrests. On 16 January 1839 three whole families in Seoul were arrested; in February 1841 the authorities arrested Christians whom they thought could lead them to Ch'oe Hae-wŏn, an important Christian who had evaded capture in 1839.Footnote 37 At least 254 Christians were arrested during the Kihae persecution, 117 of whom were subsequently executed or died in prison from the effects of maltreatment or disease. As such, these 117 individuals probably represent just over 1 per cent of a nationwide community of around 10,000, and perhaps 10 per cent of the Seoul community.Footnote 38 Even before the authorities began to exercise greater discretion in making arrests, the threat or actual application of torture, and the willingness of magistrates to accept equivocal responses as signs of apostasy, produced a winnowing effect. From the general figures, just over half of those arrested subsequently apostatised, but the rates of apostasy are even greater if individual episodes are considered. Ch'oe Kyŏng-hwan was arrested with at least forty other Christians, but after several days of torture, only Ch'oe, his wife and another woman remained steadfast. Similarly, in Ch'ung Ch'ŏng province, around sixty Christians were arrested but within a short time only one man remained.Footnote 39
In terms of devotional commitment, descriptions of the Kihae martyrs emphasise prayer and contemplation, abstinence, the reception of the sacraments, exhortations to the ‘indifferent’ (tiedes), evangelisation and the baptism of pagan infants in articulo mortis. The son of Ch'oe Kyŏng-hwan, Fr Ch'oe Yang-ŏb, wrote that his ‘father engrossed himself in frequent meditations, pious readings, an ardent charity and an admirable understanding of our mysterie’.Footnote 40 In 1839 he was made a catechist and three years earlier he had allowed Yang-ŏb to be taken abroad to train for the priesthood. Yi Kwang-nyŏl, after his baptism in Beijing, in actions redolent of Buddhist monasticism, vowed himself to celibacy, abstained from meat and renounced all worldly desires.Footnote 41 Fourteen of the women martyred during the year Kihae were leading celibate lives – a difficult and potentially dangerous course in a society where marriage was the expected norm for the able-bodied.Footnote 42 Several of the martyrs had also experienced some form of spiritual crisis, either through a falling away from the faith, usually accompanied by dissolute living, or actual apostasy.Footnote 43
In addition to their devotional activities, individuals from among the Kihae martyrs had often made a significant practical contribution to the running of the mission. Of the martyrs, fourteen were catechists, a position filled ordinarily by ‘the Christian who is most capable and the best instructed within a village’.Footnote 44 Catechists played a vital role within the Church by undertaking evangelisation, exhortation and instruction, and some had made significant contributions to the success of the mission. Chŏng Ha-sang had been one of the three laymen instrumental in reintroducing foreign missionaries to Korea – visiting Beijing on ten occasions between 1816 and 1825 – and Ch'oe Kyŏng-hwan and Kim Che-jun had each given up a son to the priesthood.Footnote 45 Other valuable services were rendered by catechists and ordinary laity alike, whether it was acting as servants to the priests, as in the case of Yi Mun-u, as a housekeeper to Bishop Imbert in the case of Thérèse Kim, or as a treasurer in the case of Cho Shin Ch'ol who, as a groom on the tribute missions, had also been a member of the group involved in bringing foreign priests into Korea.Footnote 46 As the persecution intensified during the summer of 1839, Son Kyŏng-shi and Kim Ch'ol-paek provided a refuge for Bishop Imbert after he had fled Seoul, while Ch'ol-paek also acted as a go-between for the fugitive priests.Footnote 47
VI
As well as prominence within the mission, martyrs might have a wider status accorded to them by their position in the Confucian hierarchy: thirty-three – 28 per cent – of the Kihae martyrs can be identified as yangban, at a time when yangban probably comprised around a tenth of the overall population, albeit with the greatest concentration in Seoul.Footnote 48 All but two of the fourteen catechists who died that year were yangban. The two who were not were both chungin, of whom Pak Chong-wŏn, as an interpreter, was a member of the most respected grade. This demonstrates the continuing importance of both chungin and yangban in providing leadership for, at least, the Seoul community at a time when Christianity is often viewed as being firmly associated with the lower classes.Footnote 49
Aside from their Christian commitment, their position in the Neo-Confucian social order would have imposed on these yangban a range of social and ethical responsibilities towards both their families and neighbours. Yangban – and chungin too – had access to the Confucian classics.Footnote 50 Works such as The analects would have furnished them with examples of past scholars who had died rather than compromise their jen. This essential Confucian term can be translated as ‘goodness’, ‘benevolence’, ‘humanity’ or ‘human-heartedness’. It was the mark of the ‘superior’ man (i.e. a scholar-gentleman), and it was always concerned with human relationships. Hence, although jen was associated with loyalty, this was not a narrow political loyalty, but was a loyalty to one's own heart and conscience.Footnote 51 In The analects, Confucius maintained that ‘The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their jen. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their jen complete.’Footnote 52
These ethical principles existed within a context of traditional social mores which held family relationships and responsibilities to be central, and it is clear that family relationships had considerable importance within the Korean Church. Family ties contributed not only to the extension and maintenance of the Christian community, but also provided assistance and support during persecutions. In the early stages of the Kihae persecution the authorities often arrested family groups, in one case comprising four generations, reflecting both the concept of collective responsibility and the fact that Christianity spread within and between families.Footnote 53 The record provides evidence of forty distinct familial relationships involving seventy-four of the Kihae martyrs. The most common were those of husband and wife, parent and child, and siblings. These matched the three special bonds within the Confucian ‘five relationships’ which were held to underpin society. Each imposed certain norms and duties: parents were required to care for their children, but would receive filial respect in return; the relationship between husband and wife was seen in terms of that of a ruler and his minister; and a general ethos of mutual help was promoted amongst family and more distant clan members. Jen itself was associated with reciprocity (shu): respect and consideration for others.Footnote 54 The children of Nam Myŏng-hyŏk and Yi Kwang-hŏn pleaded unsuccessfully not to be separated from their parents, while Kwang-hŏn's aged mother also insisted on accompanying her family to prison. Yu So-sa, the mother of Chŏng Ha-sang, was advised to flee by a nephew, but said that ‘I have always desired martyrdom, and I wish to share in it with my son.’Footnote 55 Despite the examples of the husband of Pak Agi who, together with his son, had (in the estimation of the authorities) the good sense to apostatise, and the wife of Yu Chin-gil who refused to convert to Christianity, the marital bond proved particularly strong with eight couples suffering martyrdom.Footnote 56 In eight other cases, children followed their parents' example, and in a further nine siblings paid the ultimate price.Footnote 57 The presence of aunts and uncles together with their nieces and nephews hints at other wider family relationships which could encourage and support confessors.Footnote 58 This network of responsibilities might extend beyond the kin group: the families of Yi Kwang-nyŏl and Kim Chang-gǔm ‘appeared in their harmony to be as one’, and in other cases refuge and charity were extended to both family and non-family members during the persecution.Footnote 59 Family as much as religious loyalty might encourage forbearance under torture: the apostate Jacques Ch'oe was rearrested and interrogated in the search for his brother, Ch'oe Hae-wŏn, but ‘on this occasion, he remained firm until the end’.Footnote 60 At least another six of the Kihae martyrs were tortured in order to betray the whereabouts of a relative; in the case of Ch'oe Yang-pok, the authorities were interested in locating his neighbours as well.Footnote 61 Yang-pok remained silent, but the apostasy of one individual might lead to the betrayal of others, a fact recognised by Yuridae [Julitta] Kim when she told the magistrate that ‘If I denounce someone, you will put them to death; if I surrender any book to you, you will burn it; that is why I will say nothing.’Footnote 62
Their position within the social hierarchy would also have given Christian yangban – and chungin – the education and confidence to hold their own in the debates which are often portrayed as occurring with magistrates.Footnote 63 As well as government-sponsored academies, an extensive system of private academies (sŏwŏn) provided training in the Neo-Confucian classics. These sŏwŏn were significant centres of learning in rural areas, and were considered to have greater academic prestige and quality than the public academies – yangban students with serious academic intentions enrolled at sŏwŏn. Considerable emphasis was placed on discussion, and it is clear from surviving curricula that debates could be sharp, inquiring and wide-ranging.Footnote 64 Women of the yangban class too would have received some degree of education: Yi Yŏn-hŭi, was said to posses a ‘great intelligence’, while the magistrate who interrogated the ladies-in-waiting, Pak Hŭi-sun and Chŏn Kyŏng-hyŏb (herself descibed as ‘having … a remarkable intelligence’), berated them for following a superstitious creed such as Christianity, even though they were better educated than most women.Footnote 65 The ability to deploy a counter-argument with confidence would no doubt have strengthened the resolve of confessors, and such debates serve to demonstrate the importance of learning, as well as proper religious instruction, in ensuring forbearance under torture or other subtler pressures to apostatise.Footnote 66 The Sŭngjŏngwŏn Ilgi recorded, in May 1839, the apostasy of three men and four women ‘incapable of reading a single character, and who can only recite certain phrases’, while Bishop Imbert noted with satisfaction the case of a female catechumen who although ‘barely instructed’ (‘peu instruite’) was very strong in her faith, and so was able to resist the tortures and avoid any word of apostasy.Footnote 67 The point too was not simply about winning debating points: as with actual forbearance under torture, these set-piece dialogues served as examples to other Christians on how to respond and behave under questioning. Interrogations are often described as semi-public dramas, witnessed at least by other Christian prisoners, and their details were also recounted in prisoners' letters, or as spoken retellings, which then circulated more widely. For eight months during 1839, the catechist Pak Chong-wŏn visited Christians imprisoned in Seoul and recorded their experiences, while the debate that year between Ch'oe Yang-pok and a magistrate had, according to Bishop Daveluy writing in the late 1850s, become proverbial throughout Wŏnju. Yang-pok's responses were recounted by Christians and pagans alike, and ‘even children’, in their discussions ‘as the most solemn affirmation of the truth’.Footnote 68
VII
The reports of such debates were one means by which Christians were presented with models of behaviour under duress, during torture and in the face of death, but how else did one ‘learn’ to conduct oneself as a confessor and martyr? By 1839 Korean Christians were certainly not short of examples upon which to draw. These came from wider church history, from the recent history of their own community, and from their own personal family histories. A translation into han'gul of the Chinese-language edition of the ‘Lives of the saints’ was part of the regular prescribed reading at meetings, and Bishop Imbert and subsequent writers were quick to see parallels between the actions of contemporary Korean Christians and martyr-saints of the Roman persecutions.Footnote 69 The six women who surrendered to the authorities were likened by him to SS Appoline, Eulalie and Caprias.Footnote 70 It is possible too that the laity saw parallels between their own circumstances and those of the ancient martyrs. The actions of Ch'oe Kyŏng-hwan in giving food to the men sent to arrest him, and then dividing his clothes amongst them, may have been in conscious imitation of St Polycarp.Footnote 71 Certainly Christians linked their own circumstances to episodes in the trial and passion of Jesus, the archetypal martyr. When Yi Kyŏng-ŏn was brought before the magistrate at Chŏnju in 1827, the torches carried by the servants caused him to recall Jesus' arrest. Pak Hŭi-sun in 1839 felt a greater understanding for the sufferings of Jesus and Mary after she herself had been tortured, while seven years later Han Pŏng-sim, whose feet had been so badly injured by torture that he was unable to wear sandals, refused the offer of a horse and walked barefoot in imitation of Jesus' journey to Calvary.Footnote 72
In addition to such universal traditions, Korean Catholics had developed both collective and, perhaps more important, family traditions concerning their Church's earliest confessors and martyrs. A general tradition held that the number of martyrs executed at Yanggeun-gun in 1801 was thirty, while the family of Won Si-bo traditionally fixed the date of his martyrdom to the thirteenth day of the twelfth month of the year Keimi (3 April 1799).Footnote 73 The ‘prison letters’ (Okchung Sŏgan) of Yi Sun-i, who was executed in 1802, had been translated from their original Chinese, while one of the three Christians executed at Haemi in 1819 had also written edifying letters.Footnote 74 Records too were kept of those who were publicly executed. In 1836 Fr Maubant found sizeable quantities of letters and other accounts relating to the early martyrs. In that year Fr Chastan requested Shin Tae-bo, who had been held in prison in Chŏnju since 1827, to compose an account of his arrest and interrogation.Footnote 75 Such letters may have been similar to Yi Kwang-nyŏl's valedictory epistle. This began with an account of his interrogation, moved on to consider God's gifts to mankind, together with Kwang-nyŏl's own personal worthlessness and sin, and concluded with an exhortation to greater faith and devotion amongst the community. Kwang-nyŏl concluded that, although the persecution was the most severe yet faced, the number of martyrs would ensure the survival of the Church. In his own final hours he exhorted his fellow Christians to ‘Neither fear danger, nor death; do not render worthless Jesus' desire to save all mankind.’Footnote 76 Kwang-nyŏl was not alone in leaving a written testimony to encourage and inspire others during the Kihae persecution. Forty Christians held in prison in May 1839 were said by Bishop Imbert to have written many edificatory letters, while Pak Hŭi-sun's letters made a great impression through their ardent words of praise for the greatness of God and their references to the Virgin and the Saints.Footnote 77 Such letters may have circulated through families or more publicly in the meetings which brought Christians together on Sundays and other feasts. At these meetings, catechists were instructed to lead the laity in prayer and the reading of texts, which included the ‘Lives of the saints’. These were then to be explained by the catechists.Footnote 78 Something of the flavour of the exhortations made with respect to persecution and martyrdom may be contained in the comments ascribed to the traitor Kim Yŏ-sang. At the meetings of Christians Kim, who was possibly a catechist before his defection, exhorted those present to hold firm and to endure patiently all the trials which God would send. Later, after his defection, he was said to have urged Christians – with a sardonic laugh – to suffer truly for the name of God.Footnote 79
An awareness of past sacrifices made by Christians clearly existed, and these sacrifices stood as examples for others to emulate, and provided hope and encouragement to those facing torture and possible execution. Yi Mun-u said that he had been sustained during torture in 1839 by the intercession of God, Mary, the angels, the saints and ‘all our martyrs’, and Yi Kyŏng-ŏn, executed at Chŏnju in 1827, had gained courage from the thought that his sister had been martyred there in 1801.Footnote 80 Yi was not alone in having a real and personal awareness of the price that his family had paid for its faith. Twenty-one of the Kihae martyrs would have been able to point to family members who had been exiled, or more often executed, mainly during the Sinyu persecution. Chŏng Ha-sang was one such individual. His father was Chŏng Yak-chŏng, author of the Chugyo yoji, who was executed in 1801, while one of his uncles was the leading Sirhak p'a scholar and seeker after a moral Confucian god, ‘Tasan’ Chŏng Yag-yong.Footnote 81 Most too would have known these relatives – fathers, grandfathers, brothers, husbands and in-laws – who included leading members of the early Church. The later example of Hyŏn Sŏng-mun nicely illustrates the development of family traditions of martyrdom. He himself was executed in 1846, but by that time he could look back on three generations of martyrs within his family: his mother and sister had been executed in 1839; his wife and son had died in prison that year; and his father had been executed in 1801.Footnote 82 Such awareness may have chimed with an indigenous concern with family genealogies, which valued the achievements of notable ancestors and hankered after posthumous respect. Fifteen of the twenty-one were yangban, the social group that showed greatest concern over ancestral pedigrees, two of whom publicly recalled their families' sacrifices. Ch'oe Kyŏng-hwan stated that his father had been executed in 1801 for the same cause for which he now appeared before the court, and Ch'oe Cho-i at Chŏnju identified herself to the magistrate as the ‘daughter of Marcellin [Ch'oe] beheaded in 1801 and the daughter-in-law of Pierre [Shin] beheaded this spring in this town’.Footnote 83
VIII
Within the Christian sources, confessors and martyrs are most often portrayed as heroic individuals, ‘athletes of Christ’, and like Ch'oe Cho-i individually confessing their faith in the face of intense suffering and the prospect of death. However, it should not be assumed from this that their struggles were entirely solitary or that they lacked practical and emotional support. On occasion confessors were tortured before other Christians: in 1846 Yi Kan-nam was tempted to apostatise, but the exhortations of U Sur-im and Kim Im-i restored her courage; and the catechist, Han I-hyŏng showed such fortitude that his torturers turned to the neophytes present, saying ‘If you wish to be true Christians, you should be like Laurent.’Footnote 84 As a matter of course Christians were lodged together in prison. Yi Kwang-nyŏl spoke of his great joy at encountering a dozen Christians all of them his intimate friends and all awaiting the death sentence.Footnote 85 Imprisoned Christians supported and encouraged each other through prayer, exhortations and stoicism in the face of death. Five men apostatised at Chŏnju, but were not released. They prayed together for God's grace, and tortured with remorse encouraged each other to repair their fault. Ch'oe Hae-wŏn for four months in 1841 instructed and comforted his fellows, while – perhaps a little insensitively – Christian inmates advised the teenage Yu Tae-ch'ŏl that he had – as yet – not suffered anything like the full rigours of the tortures available to the authorities.Footnote 86 In 1846 Im Ch'i-baek, on hearing the news of his capital sentence, told the Christian prisoners that, though he was unworthy, God had nevertheless chosen him to go to heaven first. He bade them to have courage, saying that he would take them by the hand and lead them into the kingdom of the Father.Footnote 87
In addition to encouragement and exhortations, practical assistance in coping with the sufferings and distress of imprisonment was forthcoming from both fellow confessors and the wider Christian community. Emérence Yi was consoled by other Christians after sessions of torture, and Hong Kŭm-ju assisted her fellow inmates by delousing them and dressing and cleaning their wounds.Footnote 88 In 1827 Shin Tae-bo, whose wounds had turned gangrenous and whose cell was full of worms and vermin, was helped by certain Christians who nursed him and from time to time cleaned his cell.Footnote 89 It is not entirely clear if these were fellow prisoners or not. Certainly in 1839 assistance also came from outside the prisons in the form of food, alms and emotional support. In 1837 Fr Maubant had written of the alms collected and distributed to fourteen confessors in four different prisons, and in 1839 André Pak made himself ‘the servant of the Christian prisoners’ and brought them alms, furnished by Bishop Imbert, for their subsistence, as did the Seoul catechist, Yi Mun-u. Another of the Seoul catechists, Pak Chong-wŏn, went by night through the prisons, consoling and encouraging the prisoners.Footnote 90 The importance of such networks of assistance is clearly shown by the case of Paul Yu. Arrested in Ch'ung-Ch'ŏng province, he was abandoned by his non-Christian family, and as a result left starving and without a stitch (sapeque). He was therefore forced to beg his rice from the other prisoners.Footnote 91 Finally, enduring to the end would ensure a martyr posthumous respect, and in practical terms considerable efforts were made to retrieve the bodies of executed Christians in order to provide a new focus for an expanding martyr cult, and also simply to ensure that the deceased received a decent burial.Footnote 92
Not all confessors, however, were able to endure to the end, and it is clear that many Christians apostatised. Although generally these apostates remain shadowy figures, the few cases in which greater detail is given shed light on the psychological and other pressures that might initially prevent apostasy, or result from a failure to perservere as a footsoldier in the battle between good and evil. The requirement that apostates blaspheme – the imprecations against God, the Trinity and the Virgin caused Bishop Imbert to tremble with horror – may have acted as a check on the more fervent, and for some apostasy could have been equated with treason.Footnote 93 It is likely too that apostates were expected to inform on other Christians still at liberty.Footnote 94 A small minority of apostates, whether through self-reflection or the actions of other Christians, subsequently retracted. Ch'oe Hae-sŏk regretted his apostasy and gave himself up voluntarily, while Chŏng Kuk-bo was so tortured by remorse that he could neither eat nor sleep. Encouraged by a ‘pious’ Christian neighbour, he determined to surrender himself, and his subsequent death under torture was held to have ‘consoled’ the Christian community which had been scandalised and distressed by his fault.Footnote 95 Indeed, the anguish felt over an act of apostasy might be long-standing: two of the Kihae martyrs recalled earlier lapses, dating back in one case to 1801, and the persecution of 1839 was seen by them as an opportunity to remove this stain.Footnote 96 In any case, apostasy did not necessarily bring freedom. Yi Sŏng-rye, and the five men in Ch'ung Ch'ŏng, were not released, and Kim Che-jun had lost any chance of clemency, despite his apostasy, having sent his son abroad to be trained as a priest.Footnote 97 Even as early as May 1839 two men who apostatised were exiled, and later in the summer ‘many’ apostates were rearrested.Footnote 98
IX
By employing the conclusions of modern writers concerning the significance and character of martyrdom for the early Church in the Roman Empire, it is possible to set the experiences of these Korean confessors and martyrs within a wider context. To a degree this was a lead already taken by the MEP clergy on whose accounts we mainly rely, and who had been quick to draw parallels between the circumstances of the early Korean Church and those of the Church during the Roman persecutions. As indicated in the title of his The martyrs: a study in social control, published in 1931, Donald Riddle viewed martyrdom as an aspect of social control both in terms of the desire of the Roman authorities to induce conformity and the Christian community's concern to ensure confessions of faith. The challenge faced by the early Christian community, in which Riddle considers it was ultimately successful, was to create a sense of fellowship which would enable a Christian to overcome the threats and blandishments of the persecuting state.Footnote 99 By the time of the Great Persecution, the Church was sufficiently well-organised to maintain group loyalty, and the persecution insufficiently widespread or sustained to break it. In achieving this, Riddle points to an overall ethos of loyalty created through the promise of specific rewards for success and the threat of punishment in the afterlife for failure. Indoctrination occurred through study of the Scriptures, participation in the liturgy and ecclesiastical sanctions.Footnote 100 This was reinforced by the coaching of confessors in the answers to be given to judges and other officials, access to confessors in gaol and posthumous veneration as a martyr. The wider community played an important role not only in preparing individuals, but also in supporting them during the legal process, while confessors could see their individual struggles as part of an expanding martyr cult into which they might at length be incorporated.Footnote 101 Ultimately, the example of the confessors and the exhortations left by martyrs sanctioned other Christians to behave in like manner.
Rodney Stark, writing some sixty years later, took exception both to the view expressed by earlier writers – to the effect that the martyrs' sacrifices were a form of psychopathology (specifically masochism) – and to the resultant tendency to dismiss their actions as simply irrational. Stark employed a cost-benefit analysis of religious commitment in which adherence to a ‘high-cost’ Church – in which one could suffer persecution and ultimately martyrdom – was seen as a rational choice in terms of the benefits to be gained. Far from being irrational, martyrdom may be viewed as a rational choice in a context where the greater the sacrifice incurred the greater the rewards.Footnote 102 Rather than weakening the movement, the sacrifice and stigma involved in church membership actually strengthened group solidarity by mitigating the ‘free-rider’ problem, creating a strong organisation with a highly committed membership.Footnote 103 From the point of view of costs and benefits, Christianity was in any case a fairly safe investment: for most, the sacrifice and stigma were only potential. The rarity of persecutions and the tiny number of martyrs ensured that only bishops and other prominent figures were normally at risk. Furthermore, individual confessors built up a considerable stake in martyrdom: in prison they received practical support and public acclamation in anticipation of their martyrdom; and they gained posthumous respect in the present world and eternal rewards in the next.Footnote 104
In the context of the nineteenth-century Korean Church both models have something to offer. Social control was clearly a binary. The Korean authorities sought apostasies and a return to Confucian conformity through the application of torture and other inducements, backed with the threat of execution. For the Korean Church the problem was the perennial one of ensuring that its confessors would go the course. By the 1830s it could look back on a universal tradition of martyrdom which stretched back into Roman times, as well as more recent examples of persecution within Korea. The mechanisms employed to ensure constancy were those identified for the early Church in the Roman Empire: exhortations to persevere, the circulation of letters and descriptions of trials as exempla, indoctrination into a spiritual ethos which encouraged martyrdom, practical support, and the promise of posthumous reputation and the reward of eternal life. As part of a developing martyr cult, these mechanisms informed the behaviour of Korean Christians when faced with imprisonment and interrogation, and held out the promise of incorporation into the ranks of the cult to new martyrs: the three men executed at Taegu in 1839 were held ‘in great and particular veneration among the Christians of the region [pays]’; and Bishop Imbert had, before his arrest, charged several important laymen with the task of recording the acts of the martyrs. After the end of the persecution the survivors continued their work, and the resulting account ‘met with the general approbation of the Christians, many of whom had been themselves eye-witnesses to the reported events’.Footnote 105 The limited nature of persecutions before 1866, both in their scope and ferocity, also ensured that only small numbers of Christians were at risk. The desire to procure apostasies – often with only the most equivocal of affirmations – had an effect too. Although significant numbers of Christians might be rounded up initially, only the more prominent or committed generally remained steadfast. Likewise, as the authorities gained more and better intelligence in 1839 from interrogations and defectors, they themselves came to exercise greater selectivity in making arrests.Footnote 106 Clearly, in terms of costs and benefits, for the majority of Christians before 1866 the balance sheet tended towards the latter.
In terms of the development of a spirituality which encouraged Christians to accept, and even welcome, the pain and suffering which were the consequences of the quest for a martyr's crown, much was derived from the religious ethos of contemporary French Catholicism: a firmly held belief that by his or her actions, a confessor or martyr could repay the debt owed to God, atone for past sins and receive the ultimate reward of eternal life. The attractiveness of martyrdom as a shortcut to eternal life was enhanced by a spirituality heavily tinged with dualism and an obsession with death. In following the path prescribed by this ethos, confessors and martyrs could look to a shared tradition of martyrdom, both universal and, increasingly, indigenous in its form, and were encouraged by the exhortations, example and support of their Christian community. However, in the web of factors which inspired, motivated and confirmed Christians in their chosen course, these Catholic elements were complemented or reinforced by others, which had their origins in the nature of contemporary Korean society and the fact of a church leadership that had traditionally been formed by members drawn from the Confucian elite. The Church in Korea was inevitably constrained and shaped by a social context in which Chu Hsi Neo-Confucianism had been the predominant ideology since the fifteenth century, and Buddhism had been a part of the religious milieu since the fourth century.
Exhortations to act morally, pessimism concerning the present world, a tendency towards asceticism, and a concern for group solidarity and posthumous reputation were not unique to Catholicism or its martyr cult. Many of the first Catholic converts were Namin followers of the philosopher Yi Ik, and this may have had a bearing on their acceptance and understanding of the spiritual ethos surrounding martyrdom. Yi Ik developed a significant ascetic strand within his philosophy, and had emphasised the need for personal moral cultivation through control over bodily passions and desires. Such concerns had made his followers receptive to the stoical ethics stressed by the Jesuits in their missionary texts. Moreover, although Confucianism had no developed eschatological teaching, which would have promoted a desire for martyrdom, it did encourage the pursuit of virtue and the imitation of the sages.Footnote 107 Consequently, Confucian attitudes to stoicism and virtue could have mirrored Christian concepts of martyrdom by providing yangban and chungin Christians – and possibly others – with examples of individuals who had suffered privations and death by adhering to their moral convictions, together with a received set of ascetic values. These would have been reinforced by the requirements to protect their essential humanity even in the face of death and to fulfil their social obligations to others. The sense of fellowship – both past and present – among confessors, martyrs and the wider Christian community, created as the martyr cult developed and expanded, found support in the traditional emphasis on the importance of the kin group, the mutual responsibilities incumbent on its members and the desire for posthumous reputation. Ties of blood, current and past, enhanced a sense of shared community with respect to past, present and future sacrifices. In some cases too forbearance in the face of torture and death was as much to do with the desire to protect family members and neighbours as the avoidance of religious apostasy.
Buddhist influence is perhaps harder to discern, since it was disparaged by Catholics and Confucianists alike.Footnote 108 Despite suffering social and cultural decline and increasing supression, particularly after 1600, Buddhism still retained a mass appeal among the populace, and was even able to exercise a certain influence on Confucian literati.Footnote 109 The compassionate giving of one's life to aid others is viewed positively in Buddhism (as opposed to suicide which is seen as a ‘wasted human rebirth’), and is often associated with the actions of Bodhisattvas, while the Mahāyāna in east Asia developed a small tradition of ‘religious suicides’ undertaken as demonstrations of piety or to call attention to persecutions and the sufferings of others.Footnote 110 At a popular level in Korea one of the two most popular sects was that of the Pure Land with its message of faith in Amitābha and escape from this world and final rebirth in the glorious Western Paradise as a prelude to the attainment of nirvana.Footnote 111 As with Confucian attitudes to stoicism and the preservation of virtue, such concepts would have sat easily with Catholic views of a corrupting world and, moreover, the promise of a better life in the next.
In nineteenth-century Korea, wider Catholic concepts, which sought to prepare and sustain individuals in the face of intense suffering and death, were complemented and reinforced by indigenous systems of social mores and ethical and religious thought. An indigenous martyr cult grew up from the perserverance of the Church's confessors and martyrs, and the emergence of this cult played a significant role in rooting Catholicism into its Korean context. In doing so, it prepared the ground for the later expansion of Christianity in the peninsula. In nineteenth-century Korea the blood of the martyrs proved to a significant extent to be indeed the seed of the Church.
I would like to thank the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research for their support in awarding me a grant to visit the archives of the Société des Missions Étrangères in Paris, and also the archivist, Fr Gérard Moussay, for his assistance. I would also like to thank Szu-Chi Chen and Shu-Chiu Liu, both formerly of the Department of Education, University of York, for their help in identifying and translating material from the Sŭngjŏngwŏn Ilgi.
